Wickr raises $30M for ultra-ephemeral messaging

The company closes its Series B round just four months after raising a $9M Series A

Just four months after raising a $9 million Series A round, self-destructing messaging startup Wickr has gone ahead and raised a $30 million Series B round. Because why not? The round was led by Breyer Capital, with strategic investments from CME Group and Wargaming as Wickr expands into the financial services and gaming categories. Existing investors Alsop Louie, Juniper Networks, the Knight Foundation and Riverwood also participated in the round.

Founded in 2011, Wickr literally just closed its Series A round in March. The company says, however, that its expansion plans leave no time to waste, so it raised the Series B to get things rolling.

The company is moving into the financial services and gaming industries. Andrew Caspersen, former Chief Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer of Schwab, will be heading up Wickr’s financial services division in Chicago. The strategic investment from CME Group will allow Wickr to build out the platform immediately.

It’s also working with Wargaming to bring data security and privacy to its games.

Messagse sent via Wickr are secured with military-grade encryption, and they can only be decrypted by the recipient (Wickr can’t decrypt the messages). The sender decides who sees the message, at what time, where, and for how long, and the app deletes metadata like location, time, identification, and edits. The files you delete from your device are then “forensically shredded.” Naturally, it’s anonymous, meaning Wickr gathers no information on you, and it’s integrated with Box, DropBox, and Google Files, so you can send PDFs and other files securely.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Wickr has become a top-ranked free social app in China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, and Spain. The company now serves up over a million self-destructing messages a day in over 200 countries.

The ultra-ephemeral app has huge implications for human rights activists, whistleblowers, and political dissidents around the world. Indeed, one of Wickr’s investors is Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation.

“Unlike any other messaging apps, Wickr does not require you to sign a free, transferable worldwide right to your content and conversations forever. Unlike other security apps, Wickr uses Perfect Forward Secrecy, binds each message to your device, clears metadata from files, permanently shreds deleted files from your device and knows nothing about you,” wrote CEO Nico Sell, in the company’s announcement.

Along with the new funding, Breyer Capital founder Jim Breyer will join Wickr’s board of directors.