Democratised messaging app Element’s recent $30m windfall will be used to elevate it to the same level as its rival collaboration platforms.
Element is the flagship secure messaging app from Matrix, an open-source project that provides a layer of interoperability for end-to-end encrypted communications and with the mission of democratising communications.
The $30m investment was a part of Series B funding and was led by Protocol Labs and Metaplanet, which was set up by Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype.
Element CEO and Matrix co-founder, Matthew Hodgson (pictured above), told UC Today that the capital will be used to smooth out the “rough edges” of the app’s UX and make it as well-designed as the likes of Slack and Teams to make it more attractive to users.
“We are really aggressively hiring on the design, UX, and front-end developer side to make sure that it is as sexy as the likes of Slack,” he explained.
“As an end user, you don't care about decentralisation or end-to-end encryption you just want an app that works, and if the app isn't as polished and glossy as Slack, you'll just end up using that or WhatsApp, so the design is key.
“We’ve been very successful despite these shortcomings, so imagine how successful Element could be once we've improved on these – there's no reason it shouldn't spread across the world, like the web spread across the internet”
Matrix was founded in 2014 by Hodgson and his co-CEO Amandine LePape, who also acts as COO of Element. Hodgson previously ran the unified communications division at Israeli telco Amdocs. His time in the industry made him aware of how “dysfunctional” the phone network industry was, and Matrix was established as an alternative to what the market offers. Element was then founded in 2017 as an enterprise collaboration tool.
“Element looks and smells a lot like Slack or Teams, except it's end-to-end encrypted and sits on top of Matrix rather than just being a silo, like Slack or Teams where you can only talk to people on each of those respective platforms,” he explained.
“You can talk to other people on the app without even having internet access, you can talk to them via Bluetooth if they’re in the same building as you - it empowers the end user to have complete sovereignty over their communications.
