Democratised messaging app Element’s recent $30m windfall will be used to elevate it to the same level as its rival collaboration platforms.

Element is the flagship secure messaging app from Matrix, an open-source project that provides a layer of interoperability for end-to-end encrypted communications and with the mission of democratising communications.

The $30m investment was a part of Series B funding and was led by Protocol Labs and Metaplanet, which was set up by Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype.

Element CEO and Matrix co-founder, Matthew Hodgson (pictured above), told UC Today that the capital will be used to smooth out the “rough edges” of the app’s UX and make it as well-designed as the likes of Slack and Teams to make it more attractive to users.

“We are really aggressively hiring on the design, UX, and front-end developer side to make sure that it is as sexy as the likes of Slack,” he explained.

“As an end user, you don’t care about decentralisation or end-to-end encryption you just want an app that works, and if the app isn’t as polished and glossy as Slack, you’ll just end up using that or WhatsApp, so the design is key.

“We’ve been very successful despite these shortcomings, so imagine how successful Element could be once we’ve improved on these – there’s no reason it shouldn’t spread across the world, like the web spread across the internet”

Matrix was founded in 2014 by Hodgson and his co-CEO Amandine LePape, who also acts as COO of Element. Hodgson previously ran the unified communications division at Israeli telco Amdocs. His time in the industry made him aware of how “dysfunctional” the phone network industry was, and Matrix was established as an alternative to what the market offers. Element was then founded in 2017 as an enterprise collaboration tool.

“Element looks and smells a lot like Slack or Teams, except it’s end-to-end encrypted and sits on top of Matrix rather than just being a silo, like Slack or Teams where you can only talk to people on each of those respective platforms,” he explained.

“You can talk to other people on the app without even having internet access, you can talk to them via Bluetooth if they’re in the same building as you – it empowers the end user to have complete sovereignty over their communications.

“With Element you can talk to anybody else on Matrix; they might even be bridged in from other platforms so Matrix ends up being a glue which the other platforms connect into, and it can either be used natively or  used to talk to other people on them.”

The funding will also be spent on making Element ready for peer-to-peer Matrix, maturing its Matrix-hosting business, and developing Matrix as a peer-to-peer, decentralised system with encrypted VoIP and refined end-to-end encryption. The company is also working on an open source alternative to Zoom.

Matrix has grown 190 percent in the last 12 months, and now has 35.5 million addressable users and over 75,000 deployments. It also recently announced that Germany’s entire healthcare system will adopt Matrix-based real-time communications which will see over 150,000 organisations and 80 million Germans using the platform. It also renewed a contract with the French government, providing messaging and collaboration to over five million civil servants throughout that country.

Hodgson said that the early adopters have been the US, UK, France, Germany, and Austria, but that talks are currently underway with up to 12 more international governments. It is currently targeting governments and enterprises as its customer base, but Hodgson is hopeful that this will trickle through to a consumer audience too.

“This is the rebellion uprising,” Hodgson declared.

“We as consumers have been screwed over: it’s a bit of a capitalist dystopia that we’ve ended up in where the only way to do real-time comms on the web is by using someone else’s paid products or else build it from scratch and if I do that, then I’m going to jealously keep it for myself rather than share it with anybody else”

“Matrix is a moonshot to disrupt that, by giving away high-quality communication as part of the core infrastructure of the internet, so that there is a communication layer that anybody can use on the open web for whatever they want.”

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3hZAvha