Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 with the involvement of cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, who invested their own resources to build Signal as a privacy-first messaging platform without ads or data monetization. The foundation is funded through donations, grants from philanthropic organizations, and private contributions rather than user fees, reducing commercial pressure on the project.
Technically, Signal uses end-to-end encryption by default and stores minimal metadata, with all source code openly available for public review. This means even the organization itself cannot access message content and collects very little information about who communicates with whom, unlike mainstream messaging platforms that rely heavily on user profiling and behavioral data.
Signal’s audience is smaller than WhatsApp or Telegram but highly concentrated among privacy-conscious users such as journalists, human rights workers, activists, technologists, and people living in countries with strong surveillance or censorship. With hundreds of millions of downloads and tens of millions of active users, Signal continues to grow as concerns about digital privacy increase.
