This morning, the acquisition of Keybase, a startup with encryption expertise, was announced by Zoom-although the purchase price is not known yet.
For several years now, Keybase has been developing encryption products, including collaboration and secure file sharing tools-with these, Zoom is banking on being able to boast of some security credibility as it goes through the demand growing pains of this pandemic period.
In the last couple of months, the company has faced numerous security threats. The increase in demand made some of the security deficits in the platform visible. To help build a more secure product, having a team of encryption experts on staff will help achieve that goal, hence the purchase of Keybase.
Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, said Keybase was acquired to give a higher level of security to customers as more operations are relying on the company’s services, especially for those working from home during this pandemic period.
“This acquisition marks a major step for Zoom. We attempt to develop a truly private platform for video communication-one that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants and also flexible enough to support Zoom’s wide variety of uses,” Yuan said.
The company made it known that as soon as Keybase is incorporated into the product, tools will be made available for all paying customers. “Zoom will offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts,” Yuan added.
According to the terms of the deal, Keybase will become a subsidiary of Zoom, and Keybase co-founder and Max Krohn will lead the Zoom security engineering team.
As of now, the fate of Keybase’s products is unknown, but the company did say they will figure something out.