Andy Yen and Proton Technologies, the company behind ProtonMail, are having their moment. Seven years after Yen and his co-founders launched the encrypted email app as an alternative to services offered by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, mounting consumer privacy concerns are driving a flood of new users to the company’s platform.
ProtonMail now has more than 50 million registered users, up from about 20 million at the end of 2019. While that’s still a sliver of the global email market, the rapid growth speaks to the rising influence of big tech’s critics—like Yen, who says the companies’ enormous market power and tracking of users’ personal data pose a threat to democratic values.
