Afinum acquires stake in secure messaging provider Threema

Munich/ Pfäf­fi­kon (Switz­er­land) — Afinum Achte Betei­li­gungs­ge­sell­schaft mbH & Co KG, advi­sed by Afinum Manage­ment GmbH, acqui­res a stake in Threema GmbH. Toge­ther with the foun­ders Martin Blat­ter, Manuel Kasper and Silvan Enge­ler, who will remain signi­fi­cantly invol­ved after the tran­sac­tion, Afinum will support the growth course of the past years. Toge­ther with Afinum, the company intends to further expand its own market posi­tion as the leading Euro­pean secure messen­ger for private and corpo­rate customers.

Threema (www.threema.ch), based in Pfäf­fi­kon, Switz­er­land, is a leading Euro­pean secure messa­ging provi­der for private users, public insti­tu­ti­ons as well as compa­nies. With Threema’s soft­ware solu­ti­ons, neither meta­data nor chat content is stored, which is a strong diffe­ren­tia­tor from other commer­cial messen­gers. This reflects the primary goal of ensu­ring custo­mer data secu­rity and privacy. Threema’s app for private users is used by custo­mers in over 90 count­ries. The corpo­rate custo­mer solu­tion Threema Work has become the market leader in the DACH region in recent years and is used by a large number of DAX 30 compa­nies, govern­ment agen­cies, NGOs and educa­tio­nal insti­tu­ti­ons. — Threema is to become open source.

Threema was foun­ded in 2014 by the three soft­ware deve­lo­pers Martin Blat­ter, Manuel Kasper and Silvan Enge­ler, who will conti­nue to lead the company. By ente­ring into this part­ner­ship, Threema lays the foun­da­tion for conti­nuity and gains resour­ces to grow beyond German-spea­king Europe. Threema will conti­nue to improve its own soft­ware and deve­lop addi­tio­nal features to conti­nue provi­ding custo­mers with the most secure secure messen­ger. Thanks to the inno­va­tive cross-plat­­form multi-device solu­tion, Threema will also be usable on multi­ple devices in paral­lel in the future, without leaving perso­nal data on a server. In addi­tion, Threema will fully disc­lose the source code of Threema apps in the coming months to allow anyone to check the secu­rity and func­tion­a­lity of Threema itself and verify that the published source code matches the instal­led app.

The invest­ment in Threema is the ninth plat­form tran­sac­tion of Afinum Achte Betei­li­gungs­ge­sell­schaft mbH & Co. KG.

About AFINUM
AFINUM Manage­ment GmbH is an inde­pen­dent mana­ge­­ment-owned invest­ment company with offices in Munich, Zurich and Hong Kong, specia­li­zing in invest­ments in successful medium-sized compa­nies in German-spea­king Europe.