Zoom announced the acquisition of Keybase, an end-to-end encryption technology provider on May 7 2020. The acquisition was part of Zoom’s 90-day plan to improve the security of their video communication platform. The commercials remained undisclosed.
Having over 300 million daily participants globally, Zoom has faced heat in terms of user data privacy and it plans on using Keybase’s encryption technology to provide its customers with a higher level of security.
Their plan is to offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to paid account users. However, the end-to-end encrypted meetings will not support phone bridges, cloud recording, or non-Zoom conference room systems.
Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan stated,
“This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom’s wide variety of uses.”
As per the deal’s terms, Keybase’s co-founder Max Krohn will lead the security engineering team at Zoom.