Swiss privacy company Proton has today announced the simultaneous launch of Proton Workspace and Proton Meet, its most significant expansion yet into the enterprise productivity market and a direct challenge to the dominance of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
The double launch marks a strategic pivot for the Geneva-based firm, which has built a user base of over 100 million accounts on the strength of privacy-first services including Proton Mail and Proton VPN. The company now counts more than 100,000 enterprise customers, and says it is seeing a growing shift from businesses adopting individual products to embracing the full Proton ecosystem.
An Encrypted Answer to Zoom
The headline product in today’s release is Proton Meet, an end-to-end encrypted video conferencing platform built to rival Zoom and Google Meet. Unlike its competitors, Proton Meet uses the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, an open standard, to encrypt all audio, video, screen shares, and in-call messages by default.
Crucially, the encryption model means that even Proton itself cannot access the contents of a call. The company says that security remains intact even in the event of a compromise of its own infrastructure, a level of assurance that no other major video conferencing provider currently offers.
The platform also distinguishes itself with a no-account-required model: anyone can host or join an encrypted meeting without registering for a Proton account. Free users can host calls of up to 50 participants for up to one hour. For businesses requiring more, the Meet Professional plan starts at €7.99 per user per month.
Andy Yen, Founder and CEO of Proton, said: “Whether you’re talking to a doctor, hosting a business meeting, or checking in on your kids, you rightly expect these interactions to be private and safe by default. Unfortunately, the dominant players like Google Meet and Zoom simply do not offer these assurances.”
AI Data Harvesting Drives Demand
The timing of the launch is clearly calibrated to capitalise on growing corporate anxiety about how Big Tech handles communications data. As Google, Microsoft, and Zoom accelerate their AI integrations, concerns are mounting that audio, video, and chat data captured in calls could be used to train AI models, potentially causing confidential business conversations to surface in future AI-generated outputs.
Proton Meet’s encryption architecture is designed specifically to prevent this. Because Proton cannot access call content, that data cannot be fed into any AI pipeline.
The company is also leaning into its own AI offering as a differentiator. Lumo, Proton’s privacy-first AI assistant, is included in the higher-tier Workspace Premium plan and uses encryption to ensure that AI interaction history and submitted data remain inaccessible even to Proton.
Geopolitical Risk and the CLOUD Act Problem
Beyond AI concerns, Proton is positioning Workspace as a response to legal and geopolitical risk, particularly the US CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to compel US-headquartered technology companies to hand over user data regardless of where it is physically stored.
For European organisations subject to GDPR, and for any business handling sensitive data, the jurisdictional exposure created by dependence on US platforms is a growing compliance headache. Proton, headquartered in Switzerland and majority-owned by a non-profit foundation, explicitly markets itself as operating outside that legal framework.
Yen noted that while European demand for alternatives has surged, Proton is also seeing increasing interest from US-based businesses worried about data exposure. Organisations, he said, that are concerned their confidential information is effectively becoming business intelligence for the Big Tech platforms they rely on.
What’s in the Box
Proton Workspace ships in two tiers. The Standard plan at €12.99 per user per month (annual) bundles Proton Mail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, VPN, and Pass, the company’s password manager. The Premium plan at €19.99 per user per month adds expanded storage, email data retention policies, higher Meet participant limits, and Lumo AI.
Proton Meet is available today on the web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
