Chris Coyne Okcupid

In an effort to boost security on its platform, Zoom Video Conferencing has acquired Keybase, a provider of secure messaging and file-sharing services.

The deal will bring Keybase's team of security and encryption engineers into the fold and will help accelerate Zoom’s plan to build end-to-end encryption that can reach current Zoom scalability, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said.

OkCupid was founded by Christian Rudder, Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn in 2004. Have a look at the OkCupid review and discover the path to happiness and fulfillment. Website Design and Usability.
In 2003, Yagan again teamed up with his Harvard classmates Chris Coyne and Max Krohn and founded OkCupid. Excelerate Labs. In 2009, Yagan and Troy Henikoff founded Excelerate Labs. In 2011, Yagan sold his dating website (OkCupid) to IAC for $50 million and in 2012, Yagan became the CEO of Match.com (a subsidiary of IAC).

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

[Related: Zoom Channel Chief On 'Surprising' Video Use Cases And Security During COVID-19]

In a blog post, Keybase said that its aim will be to make Zoom more secure, but “there are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.”

Email: cco yne 77@gmail.com. Encrypted: please use the Keybase app. My username is chris. Twitter: @malgorithms.

Keybase was founded in 2014 by Chris Coyne and Maxwell Krohn, the co-founders of the popular dating website OKCupid and SparkNotes, a provider of study guides. Keybase itself has raised $10.8 million led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and has 16 employees, according to Crunchbase and LinkedIn.

Zoom has seen its usage shoot up dramatically as the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic forces many around the globe to work and learn from home. However, Zoom's data privacy and security practices were called into question as cases of teleworking and online classroom hijacking -- also known as “Zoom-bombing” -- began being reported in March, which included reports of video meetings being disrupted by pornographic images, hate images, or threatening language.

The company immediately jumped into action to address these security concerns. The acquisition is a 'milestone' in Zoom's 90-day security enhancement plan, a strategy the company put in place to boost the security of its offerings, address data privacy concerns for customers and partners, and build user trust, according to the company.

The New York City-based Keybase team will work alongside Zoom's team to proactively identify, address, and enhance the security and privacy capabilities of the Zoom platform. Keybase's Krohn will lead the Zoom security engineering team, reporting directly to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, the two companies said.

Krohn and Yuan will work together to determine the future of the Keybase product, said the companies.

Zoom in April revealed Version 5 of its popular videoconferencing platform that was bolstered with several new security-minded features, including support for AES 256-bit GCM encryption, a single, easy-to-use icon that contains all security features, and the ability to report users for inappropriate conduct.

The company at the end of April retracted a claim in a blog post that it has 300 million daily active users and said it has that many daily meeting participants instead. The company said it meant to say it has “300 million daily meeting participants.” The term daily active users counts a person only once while daily active participants can count a person multiple times if that person is using Zoom multiple times a day.

Zoom stock rose 9.32 percent on Thursday afternoon to $158.92.

Maxwell Krohn and Chris Coyne, a co-founder duo behind OkCupid and SparkNotes, are launching a competitor to Slack.

In 2015, the pair co-founded Keybase, an encryption-focused startup. On Monday, it announced an early version of Keybase Teams, a chat app designed for use by teams and in the workplace -- much like Slack, the buzzy Silicon Valley app popular with startups and media companies and worth $5.1 billion. (We saw the news via Fortune.)

Chris Coyne Bio

But there's a key difference: Keybase Teams is end-to-end encrypted, meaning it's theoretically impossible for anyone to snoop in on conversations -- including Keybase itself. Slack, meanwhile, encrypts its messages, but only to its own servers.

Krohn and Coyne directly drew comparisons to Slack in a blog post announcing the new app, while bringing up the benefits of its encryption. It offers significant security advantages, they argued, making users less vulnerable to hackers: 'Keybase teamwork is end-to-end encrypted, which means you don't have to worry about server hacks. Alternatively, you can lie awake at night...fearing a breach of your company's messaging history. What if your team's history got stolen from Slack and leaked or published? The legal and emotional nightmare.'

Chris Coyne Okcupid Actor

In theory, it's an attractive proposition to organizations handling sensitive information (like a media company, say), who might be reluctant to relinquish control over the security of a key part of their infrastructure.

The user interface looks largely similar to Slack, with a mix of public and private channels that teams can chat in, alongside one-to-one direct and group messages. Slack itself is, of course, styled after traditional Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels.

It's also not explicitly targeted at companies and their teams. The startup suggested teams might be based around 'any topic': Music, cryptocurrencies, mothers in a particular neighborhood, or just a single family.

Keybase

Right now, Keybase Teams is very much a work-in-progress, still in an 'alpha' build. For the next two months or so, any team administrators will have to use command line instructions to manage the software.

It's free for anyone to use now, though Keybase says that 'if teams take off, we'll charge for larger teams. Nothing we're offering for free now will flip to a pay model, so if you make a 500-person team now and start using it, you won't someday be faced with a credit card screen just to get your files or messages.'

Krohn and Coyne, both based in New York, founded study guide site The Spark, which later became SparkNotes, in 1999. They then went on to found OkCupid, the famous dating site in 2003, with Krohn leaving the company in 2012 and Coyne in 2013.

This post originally appeared on Business Insider.