New Funding Accelerates Wickr’s Secure Communication Platform for Financial Services and Gaming
The need for a secure communication platform within financial services and gaming is exploding. To meet this need, we decided to raise an additional $30 million Series B investment much sooner than expected. In March, Wickr closed over $9 million Series A investment. Now we have the necessary resources to build the most trusted communication system in the world.
Jim Breyer, the Founder/CEO of Breyer Capital, is leading the round and joining the board. Breyer Capital is a global equity investor focused on catalyzing high-impact social and for-profit entrepreneurs. CME Group and Wargaming are joining the round as Wickr expands into the financial services and gaming verticals. Current investors including Alsop Louie, Juniper Networks, the Knight Foundation and Riverwood are also participating in the round.
I am honored to have Jim Breyer joining Gilman Louie and me on the Board of Directors. Jim is one of the top venture capitalists in the country and Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas List of Tech’s Top Investors for three consecutive years. He is passionate about investing, social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy, and actively supports numerous educational and environmental non-profit initiatives. In fact, Gilman’s first startup, Spectrum HoloByte, was one of the first investments Jim made as a venture capitalist. Jim is well known for leading Accel Partners’ investment in Facebook and has served on the boards of a range of companies from large multinational corporations such as Dell, Walmart, and 21st
Century Fox to successful startups like Etsy and Circle Financial. I look forward to welcoming him to Wickr’s board. Together, we are dedicated to building a strong social system around the world by giving secure, private communications to everyone.
“Wickr confronts the challenges of providing global private communications with the perfect combination of both innovation and integrity,” said Jim Breyer. “I am excited to join the board and look forward to working with Nico’s team to build a secure social network for billions.”
We are assembling the best people in the world to help us build the most trusted communication system by giving power to the people. Wickr users own their pictures and conversations, decide who sees them for how long and are the only ones with the key. These are features everyone wants but were never available.
Gilman Louie was the first to realize that Wickr was more than just an app. We have built a seamless and secure connection that can be used for communication and transactions of all types – one to one, one to many and many to many, human and machine. We will first focus this connection on personal, financial services and gaming.
Financial Services
Wickr’s patented protocol for secure communication is vital to the financial services industry. Now we have additional resources to build this platform immediately. Andrew Caspersen, former Chief Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer of Schwab, will be leading Wickr’s Financial Services Division headquartered in Chicago.
CME Group (NASDAQ: CME), the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace is increasing its strategic investment in Wickr in this round of financing. Earlier this year, CME Group operationalized a Strategic Investment Group to make minority stake investments in promising early stage technology companies.
Mark Fields, Managing Director said “Wickr was our first investment because it fit our investment criteria, priorities, and vision about technologies that will impact our business and the eco-system within which we exist over the long-term.”
Gaming
Both Wargaming and Wickr put data privacy and security first and continually improve the quality of products they deliver globally.
“We support a multimillion community of gamers and are committed to providing them with secure and reliable services”, said Andrei Yarantsau, the EVP of Publishing at Wargaming, a leading free-to-play developer and publisher. “This partnership allows us to work closely together, combine the Wickr’s expertise in messaging technologies with Wargaming’s knowledge of gaming community, and open up a lot of strategic opportunities for both companies.”
Personal Communications
Wickr’s flagship app enables anyone to send text, audio, picture and video messages that are private, secure, anonymous and expiring for free. Wickr recently won the Editors’ Choice for Best Overall Messaging App, beating WhatsApp, Snapchat, Viber and Google Hangouts in PC Magazine. Wickr serves millions of top-secret messages a day to millions of people in over 200 countries.
Unlike any other messaging apps, Wickr does not require you to sign a free, transferable worldwide right to your content and conversations forever. Unlike other security apps, Wickr uses Perfect Forward Secrecy, binds each message to your device, clears metadata from files, permanently shreds deleted files from your device and knows nothing about you.
