SimpleX Chat Wants Its 400K+ Users to Become Investors Too

The world is in a messed-up state where surveillance and eroding people's rights are rewarded, and those who oppose are labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, radicals, criminal sympathizers, and what not.

Yet, that doesn't stop people from investing time and money in securing their data by opting for open source mobile operating systems like GrapheneOS and taking steps to improve their privacy in the online world.

One of those steps is to go for a private messaging app that doesn't give out your data to feed some AI or a governmental agency that asks for your data nicely. SimpleX Chat is one such option, a messaging network that doesn't ask for phone numbers, emails, or user accounts.

I tried it out myself back in 2024, and it left a strong impression. The team behind it has kept building since, and now it wants its users to also have a stake in where the project goes next.

Looking for investors

The founder of SimpleX Chat, Evgeny Poberezkin, reached out to us recently, saying that they were looking to give users "the opportunity to get a stake in SimpleX Chat and benefit from its growth."

That stake comes through a SAFE, short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, live now on Wefunder.

The first $450,000 invested gets an Early Bird SAFE with a $40 million valuation cap. Once that fills up, later investors get a separate SAFE instead, this one at a $45 million cap.

There's a wrinkle though. Your money doesn't go straight into a SAFE with SimpleX Chat itself. It goes into an SPV, which is the entity that actually holds the SAFE, and your signature ends up on the SPV's own Subscription Agreement instead.

So this comes up as one version for early money, another for everyone who invests after.

The campaign's friends-first soft launch closes August 15, and as of August 11, it had already raised 50% of its target offering amount.

The company behind the app isn't quite what it used to be either. SimpleX Chat Ltd, the UK entity that built the app, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a new US company, SimpleX Chat, Inc.

Keep that in mind if you consider where a firm is based out of before investing in it.

If the campaign only clears its $50,000 minimum target, the money would go toward covering general operating expenses, just enough to keep things running a while longer.

Hitting the full $1,235,000 target would mean they could hire additional team members, build out a browser-based messaging stack, provide tools for publishers, and work on a framework for interactive widgets.

The company also expects server hosting costs to fall as more independent operators take over network infrastructure, while planning to break even using revenue from public names, business services, and what it calls Community Credits.

That is a model for getting large channels to pay for the servers they use.

Before you go ahead and invest, do understand that this comes with the usual risks of backing a company this early.

There's no guarantee of a return, and what you invest isn't something you can sell easily if you change your mind. The company's own filing goes further, stating it doesn't expect to have enough cash to keep running for the next 12 months without more funding.

A similar occurence

We already had an instance of a messaging app asking its community for help earlier this year, where Session nearly shut down after it ran out of funding, needing $1 million to keep going.

By June, the foundation confirmed development had resumed, backed by two to three developers instead of the dozen-plus it once employed.

SimpleX Chat's own filing admits it doesn't have enough cash to keep going for the next 12 months without more funding either. Raising money through equity now, rather than an emergency donation drive, gives it a strong start.