Wickr

History

Wickr was founded in 2012 by a group of security experts and privacy advocates. Nico Sell served as the company's CEO until May 2015 when she became the co-chairman of Wickr and CEO of Wickr Foundation, the newly launched nonprofit whose seed funding was provided by the company. Mark Fields, who previously led CME's Strategic Investment Group, became the company’s CEO. He served in that position until November 2016, when he was replaced by Joel Wallenstrom, co-founder of iSec Partners, becoming the company's CEO and President.

App

Initially unveiled on iOS and later on Android, the Wickr app allows users to set an expiration time for their encrypted communications. In December 2014, Wickr released a desktop version of its secure communications platform. The release of the desktop Wickr app coincided with introducing the ability to sync messages across multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and computers.

All communications on Wickr are encrypted locally on each device with a new key generated for each new message, meaning that no one except Wickr users have the keys to decipher their content. In addition to encrypting user data and conversations, Wickr strips metadata from all content transmitted through the network.

Since its launch, Wickr has gone through regular security audits by prominent information security organizations, which verified Wickr's code, security and policies. Wickr has also launched a "bug bounty program" that offers a reward to hackers who can find a vulnerability in the app.

On January 5, 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Wickr a score of 5 out of 7 points on their "Secure Messaging Scorecard". It received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having communications encrypted with keys the provider didn't have access to (end-to-end encryption), making it possible for users to independently verify their correspondent's identities, having past communications secure if the keys were stolen (forward secrecy), and having completed a recent independent security audit. It was missing points because its source code was not open to independent review (open source), and because its security design was not well-documented. In 2015, Wickr published a white paper outlining the encryption protocol that they use for end-to-end encryption.

In 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that Wickr, among only nine companies earned stars in every applicable category for its effort to protect user privacy: “We commend Wickr for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.”

In December 2016, Wickr announced Wickr Professional, a new business collaboration and communication product designed to couple the functionality of tools like Slack with end-to-end encryption and ephemerality.

In February 2017, Wickr opened one of its crypto protocols for public review on GitHub and published a paper “The Wickr Messaging Protocol” as an aid to those who wish to review the source code. At the time of its publication, the crypto protocol was only used in the company's enterprise product, Wickr Professional. The company said that its consumer product, Wickr Messenger, still uses another protocol, and that they intend to replace this protocol with the one that they published.

Funding

In March 2014, Wickr announced its Series A funding round of $9 million led by Gilman Louie of Alsop Louie Partners. The series also included investments from Juniper Networks and the Knight Foundation.

In June 2014, Wickr announced its Series B funding round of $30 million led by Breyer Capital, including CME Group and Wargaming.