Skiff – Building Our Privacy-First Future

The push to give individuals greater control of their privacy marks a fundamental shift in how we build and use technology. Today, privacy is not an optional feature. New policies, technical models, and consumer expectations change the way products are built. Skiff is building an ecosystem of privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted products for collaboration - from the ground up, surrounded by a team of advisers and investors who dream about this future with us.

Today, we’re so excited to announce our $4.1m seed round, led by Sequoia Capital. A truly incredible group of other funds and individuals also joined the round, including Ali Partovi and Jenny Wang at Neo, Beth Turner at SV Angel, Ramtin Naimi at Abstract Ventures, John Hennessy, Jerry Yang, Keller Rinaudo, Ameet Patel, Josh Manchester, Charlie Songhurst, Guy Podjarny, Julia and Kevin Hartz, Eddie Fishman, Eugene Marinelli, Michael Callahan, Bert Kaufman, Ani Banerjee, and David Petersen. We’re also thrilled to announce Skiff’s advisory board.

At a time when consumers demand privacy more than ever before, we’ve surrounded Skiff with leaders in technology, security, and consumer privacy, including:

• Erinmichelle Perri (CISO of The New York Times)
• Alex Stamos (Director, Stanford Internet Observatory, and formerly CSO at Facebook)
• Ehren Kret (CTO of Signal Messenger)
• Dan Guido (CEO of Trail of Bits)
• Amy Zegart (Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University)
• David Mazieres (Co-Creator and Chief Scientist of Stellar, and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University)

Our advisers have been involved in critical steps as we’ve built and launched Skiff’s collaboration product, from developing Skiff’s open-source roadmap to sharing new technical methods for performing scalable end-to-end encryption. Going forward, we expect our advisory board to be involved in major product, team, and security decisions. We’ve set out to make privacy accessible to everyone.

In the past year, individuals and teams have spent more time working together online, distributed around the world. The need for products that protect what we share and say is more important than ever.

Online collaboration is limited today because few platforms offer both security and usability. Until now, several challenges have stymied progress:

• Consumers must greatly sacrifice convenience to use privacy-first alternatives.
• Existing platforms add security features only once they’ve reached scale.
• Big tech companies have lost consumer trust on privacy.

At Skiff, we’re solving these problems by building a truly private platform for collaboration alongside leaders in security and design. In the past year, we’ve published our whitepaper on a model for scalable, end-to-end encrypted products, brought on Zak Blacher as our Director of Security and Aaron Marks as our Head of Strategy, and released our privacy-first platform for document creation, editing, and sharing via groups. Today, thousands of people are already using Skiff.

Our users perform critical scientific research, write personal and professional notes, and share new ideas. Every day, we receive messages, emails, Tweets, Reddit DMs, and Skiff documents about our product:

• “The app is absolutely outstanding and everything I’ve wanted. I am in shock that it looks so clean and easy to use. I’m very excited to see what the future holds.”
• “I use Skiff on a daily basis and I love it. Thanks for making such an amazing product.”
• “This has been needed for about 15 years.”

For Skiff, this capital will help us scale our technical team and build more of our end-to-end encrypted collaboration ecosystem, including mobile + native apps, spreadsheets, and a better editor experience.

If you are interested in joining Skiff and helping us build beautiful, privacy-first products, see our careers page.

Andrew & Jason