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SimpleX Chat Wants Its 400K+ Users to Become Investors Too
The world is in a messed-up state where surveillance and eroding people's rights are rewarded, and those who oppose are labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, radicals, criminal sympathizers, and what not.
Yet, that doesn't stop people from investing time and money in securing their data by opting for open source mobile operating systems like GrapheneOS and taking steps to improve their privacy in the online world.
One of those steps is to go for a private messaging app that doesn't give out your data to feed some AI or a governmental agency that asks for your data nicely. SimpleX Chat is one such option, a messaging network that doesn't ask for phone numbers, emails, or user accounts.
I tried it out myself back in 2024, and it left a strong impression. The team behind it has kept building since, and now it wants its users to also have a stake in where the project goes next.
The founder of SimpleX Chat, Evgeny Poberezkin, reached out to us recently, saying that they were looking to give users "the opportunity to get a stake in SimpleX Chat and benefit from its growth."
That stake comes through a SAFE, short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, live now on Wefunder.
The first $450,000 invested gets an Early Bird SAFE with a $40 million valuation cap. Once that fills up, later investors get a separate SAFE instead, this one at a $45 million cap.
There's a wrinkle though. Your money doesn't go straight into a SAFE with SimpleX Chat itself. It goes into an SPV, which is the entity that actually holds the SAFE, and your signature ends up on the SPV's own Subscription Agreement instead.
So this comes up as one version for early money, another for everyone who invests after.
The campaign's friends-first soft launch closes August 15, and as of August 11, it had already raised 50% of its target offering amount.