IT Blog

For Proton CEO and cofounder Andy Yen, building an encrypted email service is no longer enough.

Although ProtonMail has been around since 2014, lately the company has started setting its sights more broadly. In April, Proton launched its own calendar as a public beta, and earlier this month it expanded the beta version of its cloud storage service, called Proton Drive, to all paid subscribers. A recent redesign helped tie all those products together into one interface.

Squint hard enough, and you can see the beginnings of a more private alternative to Big Tech productivity tools, most notably Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). Yen says that’s the ultimate goal, hinting at other services like video chat on the horizon.

“Everything that Google does is uniformly not done in the most privacy-protecting way,” he says. “Over the long term, I would like to do everything that they do, but do it properly, with privacy first instead of as an afterthought.”

Yen isn’t…