05 — The Team
Five people. None of them paid yet.
Three hundred and fifty-six production builds across iPhone, Android and Mac. An Elixir relay, a post-quantum protocol, an anonymous payment rail, a twenty-one page website, an operations console and a fleet. Built by five people holding equity instead of salary, with a great deal of help from machines.
How five people ship this much
The honest answer is that the cost of building software collapsed, and we organised the company around that rather than around the way software teams used to be built. Design, implementation, review and testing run with AI agents inside the loop rather than beside it. The people set direction, make the judgement calls and carry the responsibility. The machines do the volume.
What that buys is not only speed. It is the ability to hold a standard that a larger team usually cannot afford: every claim on our public website is checked against a code gate before it can be published, the operations console is regenerated from the site's own markup so it cannot drift, and the release doors refuse to ship a tree where the version numbers disagree with each other. Those are things a company builds when it has more discipline than headcount.
Mobile
The Flutter client across iOS, Android and macOS from one codebase — the messenger, the calling stack, the on-device cryptography and the local encrypted store.
Backend and infrastructure
The Elixir relay on the BEAM, Postgres, TURN, the push rail, the blind-signature entitlement service, and a fleet that is declared in files rather than remembered.
Growth and community
Launch, the beta programme, the communities this product has to find, and the partnerships that reach them. Not performance marketing — the arithmetic does not support it.
Hemanth K R — Founder and Chief Executive
Sets the product, holds the standard, and makes the calls this company is accountable for. Every ruling that shaped the architecture on these pages — safety is never paywalled, the price is decided on our own server, delete functions must always ask first, the site may not claim what the code does not enforce — is his, on the record, with a date against it.
Nobody has taken a salary. Five people have built this for equity and the belief that it should exist. That is why the cost structure in the projections is real rather than optimistic — and it is also why the first line item in the use of funds, after the audit, is paying them.
What the round changes
- The team starts being paid. Goodwill is not a retention strategy, and the deepest knowledge of the cryptography sits with very few hands. This is the risk we are most honest about and the one most easily fixed with money.
- Two more engineers, hired against revenue rather than ahead of it. Mobile and infrastructure, in year two, when the operating line can carry them.
- An audit team we do not employ. The most valuable outside people we will pay for are the ones whose job is to find our mistakes.
Five people is not a company that survives two of them leaving in the same month. The knowledge concentration in the cryptographic core is real and the documentation, while unusually good, is not a substitute for a second person who has held the code. We are not going to tell you that AI agents make the team replaceable. They make it productive. Those are different claims and only one of them is true.