Wire, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service, has raised a $21 million Series B funding round led by UVC Partners. As the company said a couple of years ago, the company is focusing on the enterprise market more than ever.
While Wire started as a consumer app, it never managed to attract hundreds of millions of customers like other messaging apps. That doesn’t mean that Wire is a bad product.
The app lets you securely talk with other people using text messages, photos, videos and voice messages. You can also start a video call and send files with other users. Wire supports both one-to-one conversations as well as rooms.
Everything is end-to-end encrypted by default, which means that the company can’t decrypt your conversations, can’t hand them over to a court or can’t expose your conversations to a potential hacker. You can also view the source code on GitHub.
In 2019, the company told TechCrunch that it would open a holding company in the U.S. to raise some funding. The idea was to double down on enterprise customers to find a clear path toward profitability. And this focus hasn’t changed since then.
“If I think back on the evolution of the business – three years ago we had zero revenue and zero customers – whereas today we’re announcing a B round and we have clearly established a well-recognised enterprise brand amongst the likes of Gartner, which is one of the things I am extremely proud of,” Wire’s CEO Morten Brogger told me.
“I also think that with the focus on a revenue-generating, enterprise business, we avoid situations like WhatsApp, where the only model you can ultimately turn to is monetising data,” he added.
And it seems to be working well when it comes to revenue growth. Right now, Wire has 1,800 customers. The number of customers has increased by almost 50% over the past year.
The company focuses on large customers, such as big corporations and government customers with a ton of potential users. Five G7 governments are currently using Wire. Overall, revenue has tripled in 2020.
In addition to working on Messaging Layer Security (MLS), Wire has been focused on improving conference calls and real-time interactions. The company believes messaging apps and real-time collaboration apps are slowly converging. And the startup wants to offer a service that works well across various scenarios.
You can also expect more end-to-end encrypted services in the collaboration space. Wire is still relatively small with 90 employees, which means it has room to grow and iterate.
