Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

Summary

The relationship between corporate VPNs and Paid Affiliates, and who really owns your data. "This map is my best approximation of charting the relationships between VPN companies, media companies, and affiliate programs."@sobeyharkerWho Owns VPN Comanies? The VPN Industry Relationship MapTake me to the full map (Third-party website). VPN RelationshipsI’m mapping the relationships between VPN companies. @sobeyharker I’m the Community Manager at @windscribecomWhat am I looking at?This beauty right here is a VPN map that charts every proven relationship between media companies, content sites, corporate VPNs, and independent VPNs that I could find - and it's only the 1.0 version. I hope to map and track other information that might prove useful to people with the help of more contributors in the 2.0 version.KEYRed - Corporate Relationship & OwnershipOrange - Paid Relationship or Paid Affiliates (Dashes)Blue - Cooperation or Partnership (These companies may share staff, resources, networks, or facilities with one another).Purple - Corporate Media Relationship & OwnershipBrown - Legal DisputeHover over nodes to highlight relationshipsUse right-click to focus on select areasWho Owns Express VPN?ExpressVPN Company StructureExpressVPN was founded in 2009 by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantzwe who later sold it to British-Israeli security software company Kape Technologies in a $936 million deal.Hence Teddy Sagi, the owner of Kape, is now the owner of ExpressVPN. We'll get to a discussion of Kape later in this article, but the graphic above clearly shows the web of VPN companies and affiliate sites it owns. ExpressVPN is now part of a larger corporate network of VPNs that also includes Cyberghost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and Goose VPN.Who Owns NordVPN?NordVPN Company StructureNordVPN is owned by childhood friends Tom Okman and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, both Lithuanian citizens. As visualized in the graphic above, NordVPN falls underneath a larger corporate structure t...