safing-web/about/index.md

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Ownership & Team

The company behind Safing is Safing ICS Technologies GmbH, a private company registered in Austria. The company is fully owned by its three founders.

Raphael - CEO

owns 30% , joined December 2017

Raphael noticed that online - everywhere he went - he was treated like a 1st class citizen. He soon realized: when he received benefits he did not earn, someone else had to pay to cover the costs. His responsibility is developing and managing our business. He also takes care of networking, company culture and accounting.

Daniel - CTO

owns 40% , joined January 2017

Daniel studied IT-Security. At his first job, his skills led him to become the system architect of the first Austrian cyber attack simulation platform. Ever since the Snowden revelations he invested most of his free time to conceptualize privacy solutions. He is the brain behind the Safing Privacy Network and its lead developer.

David - Dev & Community Manager

owns 30% , joined January 2017

Previously, David worked on large scale gaming applications with millions of users. Seeing first hand how the industry gathers and processes intimate user data, he became more and more aware of the importance of privacy. His responsibilities at Safing are development, community management as well as writing and podcasting.

Martin - Company Advisor

joined July 2019

Martin's track record in international management and sales is invaluable to our team. As our consultant and coach he comes by one day a week to help us think through and reflect over past steps, empowering us to make better decisions in all key areas.

Alex - Developer

joined September 2019

Alex is involved in building the backends of the major web platforms of Safing, including the SPN user platform and payment system. As the first employee he also helped shaping the company.

Luke - Designer

joined October 2019

Luke's uncompromising passion for privacy led us to hire him directly from within the community. With his pragmatism and determination towards easy design he already made a big impact.

Tabitha - Backoffice

joined January 2020

Tabitha is supporting us to tackle all emerging bottle-necks in the office. May it be accounting, reporting, writing or editing podcasts - she is always eagerly helping out.

Patrick - Senior Dev & Server Admin

joined March 2020

With his wide experience, ranging from IT-security and pen-testing to driver development to server management, Patrick rapidly became an invaluable part of the team. With his passion for Go-lang he is primarily advancing the SPN.

Privacy First

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union clearly states in Article 8:

Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

Privacy is your right, we want to do our part to make it easier for you to reclaim that right!

Open Source

To ensure maximum privacy and transparency we need to be open in every aspect. That's why we [publish all of our hard work]({{ site.github_url }}) as open source. This way you and others can validate if we truly stay to our word. But we do not want to stop there.

Ethical Funding

Taking money always means opening up to influences. That is why we see it as our responsibility to be thoughtful about taking investments. We do not want parties to gain influence which do not or might not stand behind our values. That is why in our current funding phase we took more personal risks instead of selling parts of our company for easy money.

Transparent Funding Policy

For us, ethical funding also means we want to make sure that our users know who paid for the programs and services they use.

As a result we openly share how we are funded. All our funding (and partnerships) will remain public!

Influences updated November 2019

This section shows what influences the company is exposed to. This includes received funding, partnerships, supporters, trainings and other things.

Personal Investment

Starting from 2017

We invest our personal time and money to further push the project and company. Starting from 2017, and drastically increasing over the next years, we personally invested over 200.000€ in value.

invested over 200.000€ in value

You can support us by donating.

FFG

2019-2020

The FFG is the national funding institution for Research & Development of Austria. Their goal is to strengthen innovation within Austria, advancing their international competitiveness and its economy.

We got accepted into the FFG Basisprogramm in September 2019. The included funding and loan enables us to hire our first employees and further progress our products.

received 82.800€ funding (2019)

received 78.200€ loan (2019)

82.800€ funding held out in prospect (2020)

78.200€ loan held out in prospect (2020)

Netidee

2017-2019

Netidee funding from 2017 helped us to kickstart all this. In late 2018, they granted a follow-up funding for the year 2019 🎉

received 47.799€ funding (2017)

received 30.048€ funding (2019)

7.512€ held out in prospect (2019)

ESA-BIC Austria

2018-2020

Safing ICS Technologies GmbH is participating in the ESA Business Incubation Centre Austria.
We are incubated by Accent, with SPG and the Lower Austrian State as the contractual partners.

coaching over the incubation timespan

received 30.000€ in funding

20.000€ held out in prospect

FoE

Fund of Excellence

2018-2019

The Fund of Excellence is an investment fund by the Erste Group, that invests in people, rather than companies.
They are actively investing in one of Safing's founders.

receiving continuous personal funding

Clear Business Model

Instead of pushing a free product and worry about the business model later, we wanted to have a strong foundation and have this figured out right from the start:

The subscribers of our Safing Privacy Network will be our main source of income. As soon as we can carry ourselves with SPN, we will further develop privacy enabling, open source tools. One such product in the pipeline is a free Application Firewall, which will block malicious outgoing connections.

If you like what we are all about, consider supporting us by subscribing to SPN or engaging in our community!