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."

This investment is possible under regulation crowdfunding via Wefunder, and all the terms are available on the SimpleX Chat page. People who invest $500 or more would receive public SimpleX names that SimpleX Chat is currently testing.

Until August 15, these names would be for 10 years, and for 5 years for early bird investors after that.

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.

SimpleX Chat also recently pivoted to public channels and infrastructure payments for large channels as their core commercial strategy, publishing a whitepaper about Community Credits that would allow private payments for infrastructure via prepaid credits.

Other planned sources of revenue include public names in the network for channels and businesses and business messaging via browser.

To further explain, public names use blockchain contract on the Ethereum mainnet and are fully controlled by the users’ keys. You can test the temporary names in the mobile apps for SimpleX Chat.

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 filing says that they have enough cash for the next 12 months.

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 raising money through equity now, rather than an emergency donation drive, gives it a strong start.