 to announce that we’re furthering Skiff’s mission to make collaboration usable, private, and decentralized with the completion of a $10.5 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

Our Series A followed a $4.2 million seed round, also led by Sequoia. We’re incredibly excited to welcome a diverse group of angel investors with deep expertise in the domains of privacy and decentralization: John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Gaby Goldberg, a crypto investor at TCG, and Albert Ni, from Dropbox and the Ethereum Foundation.

“Our digital lives should be as private as our physical lives. Recent events underscore the importance of products that are fully private and where users own their own data,” said Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia. “Skiff is building an amazing team and visionary products to lead this moment. We couldn’t be more excited to double down.”

Skiff offers a completely private, end-to-end encrypted workspace ideal for teams that want full control over their own data. Everything from building a personal knowledge base to writing collaborative meeting notes is done in complete privacy. No one, not even Skiff, can ever see the title, content, or description of a user’s document.

In addition to end-to-end encryption of all their data, Skiff users have the option to leverage the fully decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Account creation and document sharing can also be completed using a decentralized, self-managed crypto identity, such as an Ethereum wallet.

Skiff is actively recruiting talented people who are motivated to help bring about our vision of secure, private, decentralized collaboration. See our current openings and reach out to us at hello@skiff.org. For privacy-focused teams, email us at hello@skiff.org or sign up directly at app.skiff.org.

—realizing our vision to build the application layer for Web3—private, decentralized, and end-to-end encrypted.


Decentralization and privacy defy major trends in the last decade of the internet: Centralization and abstraction. Websites, services, and collaboration platforms serve content, aggregate user data, and run computations via massive data centers and cloud providers. Decades of new algorithms grew around these anti-privacy computation models, from operational transformations (which aggregate and compose user input in real-time collaborative applications) to MapReduce (which permitted massive clusters to sequence and process inflows of user data). Today, when using most cloud services, individuals’ personal information is constantly sequenced and analyzed to support new features - such as predictive typing - and better advertisements.


Today, the world is different. Decentralized finance, storage, and identity upend these traditional models and offer a brighter, more private, and more personal future for computing. Decentralized data structures (such as CRDTs), algorithms, and storage platforms (more below!) present a new model wherein computation can be distributed among users of an application, and data stored without levels of abstraction or control by cloud providers.


Decentralization and privacy go hand-in-hand. While privacy demands that users know exactly how and when their personal data is shared, decentralization keeps users’ information outside of anti-private, centralized databases. End-to-end encryption and decentralization together truly deliver complete control over personal data to Skiff users. Technically and organizationally, decentralization helps us deliver on our core promise to users.
In this world, we see:
The predominant communication and computation model as peer-to-peer (p2p);


Identity as defined by an individual’s keypairs, which can be used for messaging, finance, collaboration, and more;


Users are able to benefit from services without sharing any data with service providers.


In this technical model, Skiff empower users with more control over their work, creativity, and personal information.


Your identity is your keypair. Skiff’s products keep your personal information private to you. Our whitepaper details this approach to provisioning users with keypairs (for encryption and attestation). Like a password manager or a crypto wallet, this technical design represents the foundation of decentralized collaboration.


Decentralized real-time collaboration via CRDTs. As detailed in our pre-launch blog post on decentralized collaboration from March 2021, decentralization allows us to realize numerous technical and user-friendly advantages. In particular, CRDTs enable us to, in real time, synchronize data structures across multiple Skiff users around the world. Users communicate end-to-end encrypted document changes to each other and arrive at fully synchronized, independent copies of working documents.


Decentralized storage via IPFS: We are incredibly excited to announce our collaboration with Protocol Labs and IPFS to build fully decentralized storage into Skiff. In IPFS, Filecoin, and libp2p (for direct peer-to-peer communication), Protocol Labs is building foundational infrastructure to enable decentralized, privacy-first applications like Skiff.


Now, Skiff users can store files, static content, and more via the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). Inside the settings page, users can enable or disable IPFS storage.

Skiff, Decentralized

We believe that open sourcing is an essential part of building trust

 around secure products. As a first step to completely open sourcing Skiff, we're sharing two key components of the Skiff codebase: our typed-AEAD envelope and UI component libraries.

As we scaled out our platform, it became important to be able to inspect metadata without having to decrypt objects. This would both save compute and prevent decryption of badly-formatted data.

Our authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) envelopes library allows us to embed additional information in the output of encryption functions. While the nacl family of envelope functions (e.g. secretbox) only support encryption-related metadata (e.g. nonces), our library is more extensible. We currently use our AEAD library at Skiff to validate data versions and types.

Skiff UI is a react components library for the Skiff UI Design System. It's currently in-use almost everywhere on our app. Over time we plan to continue adding more security and privacy-focused components to the library. Our hope is that Skiff UI will be able to spread usability to security products more widely.

The two libraries can be accessed at the following links: 

. We're releasing them under the GNU AGPLv3 license.

We look forward to having more eyes on our codebase, and appreciate any feedback. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to reach out to us at hello@skiff.org.

Skiff is Open Sourcing

The push to give individuals greater control 

of their privacy marks a fundamental shift in how we build and use technology. Today, privacy is not an optional feature. New policies, technical models, and consumer expectations change the way products are built. Skiff is building an ecosystem of privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted products for collaboration - from the ground up, surrounded by a team of advisers and investors who dream about this future with us.

Today, we’re so excited to announce our $4.1m seed round, led by Sequoia Capital. A truly incredible group of other funds and individuals also joined the round, including Ali Partovi and Jenny Wang at Neo, Beth Turner at SV Angel, Ramtin Naimi at Abstract Ventures, John Hennessy, Jerry Yang, Alexandr Wang, Bill Ackman, Keller Rinaudo, Ameet Patel, Josh Manchester, Charlie Songhurst, Guy Podjarny, Julia and Kevin Hartz, Eddie Fishman, Eugene Marinelli, Michael Callahan, Bert Kaufman, and David Petersen.

We’re also thrilled to announce Skiff’s advisory board.

At a time when consumers demand privacy more than ever before, we’ve surrounded Skiff with leaders in technology, security, and consumer privacy, including:

 (Director, Stanford Internet Observatory, and formerly CSO at Facebook)

 (Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University)

 (Co-Creator and Chief Scientist of Stellar, and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University)

Our advisers have been involved in critical steps as we’ve built and launched Skiff’s collaboration product, from developing Skiff’s open-source roadmap to sharing new technical methods for performing scalable end-to-end encryption. Going forward, we expect our advisory board to be involved in major product, team, and security decisions.

We’ve set out to make privacy accessible to everyone.

In the past year, individuals and teams have spent more time working together online, distributed around the world. The need for products that protect what we share and say is more important than ever.

Online collaboration is limited today because few platforms offer both security

usability. Until now, several challenges have stymied progress:

 Consumers must greatly sacrifice convenience to use privacy-first alternatives.

 Existing platforms add security features only once they’ve reached scale.

 Big tech companies have lost consumer trust on privacy.

At Skiff, we’re solving these problems by building a truly private platform for collaboration alongside leaders in security and design. In the past year, we’ve published 

 on a model for scalable, end-to-end encrypted products, brought on Zak Blacher as our Director of Security and Aaron Marks as our Head of Strategy, and released our privacy-first platform for document creation, editing, and sharing via groups.

Today, thousands of people are already using Skiff.

Our users perform critical scientific research, write personal and professional notes, and share new ideas. Every day, we receive messages, emails, Tweets, Reddit DMs, and Skiff documents about our product:

 “The app is absolutely outstanding and everything I’ve wanted. I am in shock that it looks so clean and easy to use. I’m very excited to see what the future holds.”

 “I use Skiff on a daily basis and I love it. Thanks for making such an amazing product.”

 “This has been needed for about 15 years.”

For Skiff, this capital will help us scale our technical team and build more of our end-to-end encrypted collaboration ecosystem, including 

If you are interested in joining Skiff and helping us build beautiful, privacy-first products, see our 

Skiff – Building Our Privacy-First Future

: Privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted, open-source, Web3-native email.

Skiff Mail is built to be the next generation of email. Since the mid 1990s, email has brought an unprecedented degree of collaboration to the world - allowing scientists to share research, families to stay in touch, and the professional world to function.

Yet even as email has been adopted by billions of individuals, most large mail providers still have woeful privacy protections — allowing users’ messages to be read, processed, and stored by third parties.

Skiff Mail shifts the paradigm with simple and intuitive privacy. Skiff never stores unencrypted copies of any messages sent on Skiff Mail - and every Skiff-to-Skiff messages is end-to-end encrypted. Sign up, log in, and every message you send is owned by you.

Privacy applies beyond messages sent to and from Skiff Mail. Every message received from an external, third-party mail provider is immediately encrypted - ensuring only users have access to unencrypted copies of their emails.

Open-sourcing has always been a central piece of our strategy at Skiff, allowing us to build trust with our community and deliver transparent and trustworthy privacy. This is why we have decided to open-source the entire Skiff Mail product on launch. Visit 

Skiff Mail is also Web3 native. Sign up for Mail with a crypto wallet (currently MetaMask and soon Brave Wallet) to collaborate while completely owning your data. Just like Skiff's Workspace product, users have the option to store data on Protocol Labs' decentralized storage network IPFS, and also to send emails to/from their ENS addresses.

To use Skiff Mail, sign up for a Skiff account at 

Skiff Mail features instant, privacy-preserving search. Full text search has been a key feature in Skiff’s collaboration platform - allowing you to search through workspaces containing thousands of files instantly. We have brought this search function to Skiff Mail, allowing for message, subject, to/from/cc search, and more. Skiff’s search is completely open source - read more about Skiff search on 

Mobile and desktop apps for sending, receiving, and notifications are crucial for using email. Skiff Mail launches with fully featured mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as a fully featured macOS desktop app. Check them out below:

Skiff Mail lets you sign in, send, and receive mail using a crypto wallet. For the first time, send directly to an ENS address using Skiff. Read more about our wallet integration on Skiff’s 

Every Skiff Mail user receives 10 GB of free storage to send and receive mail and attachments. As we transition out of Skiff Mail Alpha into future versions, we’ll support additional storage and paid plans.

Introducing Skiff Mail

 “Encrypted Email Company Skiff Wants You To Sign Out Of Google Workspace Forever” announcing the launch of Skiff Calendar and Drive to the public.

In only one year, we’ve launched four products - 

 - and signed up over a quarter million people to our private, end-to-end encrypted email, collaboration, and communication products.

 for using Skiff products on your native devices.

We’re incredibly grateful to Skiff’s users, Pro subscribers, and Business users, as well as to our tens of thousands of community members across our 

Calendar and Drive Launch in Forbes

 to complete the privacy-first workspace. Our mission is to empower freer, more creative, and more expressive communication and collaboration - and a shared calendar brings us even closer to that future.

Our calendars store a corpus of our lives - our appointments, our contacts, or family gatherings, and much more. They contain a record of where we go - flights, coffee meetings, and birthday parties - and what we’re working on.

Calendars also integrate deeply into the modern workspace. Teams use shared calendars for important meetings; every iOS and Android device relys on calendars for appointments and notifications; event invites are a critical reminder for upcoming meetings or deadlines.

Skiff Calendar is an end-to-end encrypted, private calendar that integrates deeply with Skiff Mail, Drive, and Pages. Skiff Calendar allows sending events and updates to external users, syncs across devices, and is built to be completely privacy-first. Read on for more information about how Skiff Calendar works, how to sign up, and what features are available.

Skiff Calendar is an end-to-end encrypted digital calendar for managing your schedule, planning events, and inviting both Skiff and external users. Skiff Calendar is built to be privacy-first, keeping your external attendees private and end-to-end encrypted, and easy to use, with convenient features you’d expect from any other digital calendar.

We bulit Skiff to be a privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted workspace for collaborating and communicating. With hundreds of people now using Skiff, Skiff Calendar brings us even closer to realizing this vision.

Digital calendars have become a crutch for managing our work, schedules, contacts, and personal life. It’s estimated that 70% of internet-using adults use a digital 

. Given the deep intersections between email and calendar - as well as privacy and calendar events - building Skiff Calendar has been a high priority.

Skiff Calendar is available on the web, with mobile apps for both iOS and Android coming soon. Skiff Calendar is compatible with all major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari, Edge, and more. As mobile apps become available, Skiff Calendar will deliver notifications for invites, reminders, and upcoming events.

Every Skiff user has a Skiff Calendar available at 

 It’s free to use for everyone! If you are on a Pro or Business plan, you’ll also have access to a calendar, which can be used for your full team workspace.

If you are signing up for a new Skiff account, navigate to 

, then create your new account. From there, you’ll be able to choose Calendar from the top left corner.

Once you’ve opened Skiff Calendar, you can create events, send invites, and import existing ICS files. We’ll have more import methods coming soon.

Skiff Calendar keeps your private event information completely end-to-end encrypted, including the title, location, details, and all external recipients.

Can I invite exernal (non-Skiff) attendees?

Yes. You can invite any external attendee on another email provider, and they will receive an invite email that will allow synchronization of the event between your and your guest’s calendars. Furthremore, Skiff 

will not know the email address of your guest.

In the beta version, recurring events are not yet possible. They’ll be available soon!

Shared calendars will also be available in the next month outside of the beta version.

How does Skiff Calendar integrate with Skiff Mail?

Events you receive in your Skiff Mail inbox will automatically appear in your Skiff Calendar. Likewise, any invite you send externally to other Skiff users or external users will integrate directly into their calendars, including RSVPs (yes, no, maybe) on events.

How can I download Skiff Calendar on iOS, Mac, or Android?

 links to Mac, iOS, and Android applications. Currently, Skiff Calendar is available on the macOS app and in the web; iOS and Android applications will be released shortly.

Skiff Calendar Launches!

The Skiff Drive iOS app is launched! Download it at 

. Skiff Drive is a platform for end-to-end encrypted file storage and sharing. You can upload, view, share, and download files of any type, from documents to Excel spreadsheets. In this blog, we’ll walk through some of the capabilities of the new Skiff Drive mobile app.

Our digital files store more personal information than our homes. From medical records and personal journals to job applications and client reports, drive storage holds our life’s work and history.

Skiff is an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-first workspace for your most sensitive work. Given this mission to empower the world to work more freely and effectively - to be people, and not products - drive storage for files and data is a core, critical part of this mission.

Earlier this year, we launched the first 

 of Skiff Drive to enable uploading and viewing files on the web. Today, we make Skiff Drive simpler, more powerful, and more intuitive with the launch of an end-to-end encrypted file storage app for iOS.

Cloud storage enables users to upload files, data, and other information into servers operated by cloud providers. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.

Cloud storage services can be utilized from a public network, private network, or hybrid network of both public and private access. Cloud storage often provides data redundancy, storing identical copies of data in multiple physical locations to protect data in the event of equipment failure or natural disasters. Users can access data stored on remote servers by using a web browser or a mobile app.

As we store more and more sensitive or personal data in the cloud, it becomes critically important to make sure that our data is properly secured. End-to-end encrypted cloud storage is the highest standard in cloud storage security and ensures that your data is safe from prying eyes.

Everything on Skiff Drive is end-to-end encrypted and private to you

By encrypting your data before it is uploaded to the cloud with keys that are known only to you, Skiff Drive will ensure that only you and shared recipients can ever access your data. This is especially important for businesses who may store customer or client data in the cloud. By encrypting that data, businesses can help ensure that their customers' information is safe, increasing trust for all users.

Immediately on opening the Skiff Drive app, the interface allows for direct upload of files using the upload button in the bottom right corner. Simply tap this button to start uploading files to your Workspace.

After you’ve selected a file, you are taken to an in-app viewer, which can preview most types of commonly shared files. In the top right corner, the Share button allows you to share the file with other Skiff users, or to generate a shareable link that can be transmitted in any messaging app (or via 

On Skiff Drive, you can also download files to your device, including in the new iOS app. This enables sending, receiving, and downloading files for offline use or later viewing.

Every Skiff user is granted 10 GB in free storage for mail, files, notes, and more. For more storage, you can upgrade to the Pro plan for 100 GB of storage, and 1 TB of storage on the Business plan.

If you have feedback on this first release, please feel free to contact us at support@skiff.org, DM us on 

 and send a message to the group. We also wrote a longer blog on 

 and a lengthy technical overview on why end-to-end encryption 

Skiff Drive iOS app launched

Skiff Domains take all the pain out of domain registration for your own privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted mail address. Instead of configuring MX, CNAME, and TXT records, you can now simply sign up, open Skiff Mail, and purchase a domain that will be automatically configured to receive mail privately on Skiff.

Skiff Domains help you go from Mail users to a professional custom domain - for your business, family, or personal projects - in seconds.

To start, open Skiff Mail, and click into the settings page inside Skiff Mail. Then, click on the “custom domains” tab on the left. Or, click this link to go directly to custom domain settings → 

https://app.skiff.com/mail?settingTab=custom+domains.

From this settings page, you can create, purchase, or manage all of your custom domains. This includes adding domains that you already own using DNS record verification, adding aliases for domains that are already verified, and purchasing new domains on Skiff.

To start with buying a domain, click “Buy custom domain.” Then, you’ll be prompted with an input field to search for a new domain. Once you’ve entered a search term, you’ll view suggested domains with different endings. Once you’ve selected your preferred domain, simply click on it, and you will be redirected to a checkout page to sign up for a subscription for your domain.

After checkout is complete - congratulations! Your domain is now ready for use on Skiff Mail. Note that you may have to wait 3-5 minutes for DNS records to propagate.

To purchase a domain through Skiff Domains, you’ll have to be a 

 subscriber with access to custom domains.

Then, follow the guide above to purchase your domain. After waiting a few minutes, it will be set up with all needed DNS records for sending and receiving mail. Then, visit the alias tab (via 

) and click “add alias” under your domain to add email addresses. Anyone shared on your workspace will also be able to use aliases at this domain.

Managing a domain name and DNS records can be frustrating and tedious, as you have to transfer them from the original source, wait for them to update, and fix any typos or errors. Purchasing a one-click domain through Skiff avoids all of this complexity, allowing you to simply click and checkout to send email from a custom domains.

Adding aliases with a Skiff domain is as simple as using any other custom domain. Once purchased and verified, you’ll see your Skiff domain at the bottom of the custom domains settings page (inside the “Manage domains” section). There, click the … dropdown and “add alias;” you’ll then be able to add any alias, including a one-character alias.

If you have any questions, reach out to us in-app via the “send feedback” button, on 

If you cancel your subscription, your domain will no longer be renewed. As long as your subscription and payment information is active, your domain will continue to be renewed and work with Skiff Mail.

Yes! Any Skiff Domains purchased domain works natively for Skiff Calendar as well. All invites will be sent from the alias you’ve set as your default email alias from inside Skiff Mail.

There is no limit on the length and type of aliases. So, if you want a one-character alias, go for it!

Unlimited aliases can be added per domain, just like any custom domain.

Skiff raises $10.5 million Series A

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