We hope that everybody had a great christmas holiday season. 2012 has been an incredible year for the whole BoxCryptor Team and we’d like to thank you all for your ongoing support! We have been able to reach very important and significant milestones in the past 12 months – as a company but also regarding our product.
We started the year 2012 as a tiny little 3 person team: Andrea and Robert worked full-time (thanks to the EXIST grant by the German government) and Boris helped us out as working student wherever he could. The grant ended in March and in April we moved out from our lovely small room in the computer science department at the University of Augsburg into a “real” office located in the aiti-park Augsburg – a local technology and business center for young high-tech companies. After we talked with different investors at the beginning of 2012, we closed our seed financing round in May with Agile Partners GmbH, owned by the founders of network security company Astaro AG (acquired by SOPHOS).
Thanks to growing revenues and – most important – to the investment we have been able to grow our team and hire really great team members and developers (e.g. here, here and here) so that we’re now a healthy team of 12 people dedicating our time to further improve BoxCryptor and helping our users to secure their data in the cloud. We are also very happy about the awards we received in 2012 as a sign that we’re on the right track to solve a very important problem in the cloud era. Andrea was chosen as one of six female founders to be supported by the UniCredit / HypoVereinsbank and Stephanie Czerny – co-founder of the famous DLD Conference. Amongst others, we won the start-up pitch at the European Pirate Summit and we have been awarded with the Innovation Award 2012 of Deutsche Telekom (more info).
Of course, we also got our heads down and worked hard on BoxCryptor. We added more features, fixed bugs, integrated additional cloud storage services and brought BoxCryptor to more platforms. For example, we added support for multiple drives in BoxCryptor for Windows (here), released our first version of BoxCryptor for Mac OS X (here), integrated Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive to BoxCryptor for Android and iOS (here and here) and even released a first version of BoxCryptor for Windows 8 (here) which can be used on Windows RT devices like the new Microsoft Surface. We’re also very proud of our first alpha release of BoxCryptor for Chrome which directly encrypts and decrypts you data at the Dropbox and Google Drive websites without the need to install other local software.
Due to these new products, features and improvements, we decided to slightly increase the price of our Unlimited Personal license by the 21st of January – according to the increased value: from EUR 29.99 (or US-$ 39.99) to EUR 34.99 (or US-$ 44.99). The Family license will still be available for an additional EUR 10.00 (or US-$ 10.00) charge. Our Unlimited Business license will keep the USD price, but due to exchange rate changes, the EUR price will be adjusted from EUR 69.99 to EUR 79.99.
So if you – or your friends – still need some licenses, you still have some time to get them for the “old” price.
Looking back, it had been a great year 2012 but we already have many plans for 2013 – of course we can’t tell you all of them yet, but here’s already a small insight:
First we will – again – move to a bigger office as we grew so quickly that it got already quite cramped in our current office. But as it will be in the same building, the move should be quite smooth.
Naturally we will continue to support more cloud storage services: You will soon be able to say “Hello” to SugarSync on Android and WebDAV on iOS – just to name two. But moreover we are already working on BoxCryptor 2.0 which will – next to some other great improvements – offer you a much better sharing functionality and experience. This version will still take some time, but it will be ready within the first half of 2013. We can’t tell you more about it yet, but we will provide you with more information in the upcoming weeks. Of course, there will be a discounted (and even free) upgrade path for existing customers depending on the purchase date.
Just like maybe all of you, we also have three New Year’s resolutions for 2013:
- Keep on facilitating a secure usage of the cloud
- Improve our existing products and bring more fabulous products to you
- Grow our team (yes, we still have open positions 🙂 )
We desperately hope that you all keep on using our products, recommend us to your friends and colleagues and also support us through 2013.
Wishing you all the best for 2013!
Founders Andrea & Robert
And the rest of the BoxCryptor Team
Boxcryptor Blog 