Surfshark founder reveals ties to NordVPN and Tesonet

Date:
Fri, 28 Jan 2022 14:44:23 +0000

Description:
Is Lithuania turning into the Silicon Valley of VPN providers?

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As with many privately owned VPN providers, popular VPN provider Surfshark
has remained coy about its ownership or corporate structure. However, in a first, Surfshark CEO and founder Vytautas Kaziukonis revealed to Verslo inios (a Lithuanian business news site) that Surfshark was developed together with Nord Security and NordVPN, under the umbrella company and business incubator Tesonet.

This new disclosure raises some interesting questions about the specifics of Surfsharks links to NordVPN, past and present, and why this had never been admitted to before. Tesonets website lists a dozen products that it has created and invested in, including Nord Securitys range of offerings, but
does not reference Surfshark.

According to Surfshark CEOs interview with the Lithuanian news site (and machine-translated in English), Surfshark was part of the Tesonet Group for the first two years of its operations. Tesonet helped Surfshark with "things like hiring and office rentals.

In the interview, Vytautas Kaziukonis described Surfshark and Tesonets
current relationship as close friends who share market insights and
forecasts. He stated Surfshark is a Lithuanian capital company, but we would not like to disclose our shareholders yet. Welcome to Vilnius

Surfshark had previously announced a reorganisation and relocation from the British Virgin Islands to the Netherlands, but had not mentioned Lithuania as part of that announcement.

Tesonet is also the investor behind Oxylabs , a proxy service that provides solutions for large-scale public data gathering, as well as Hostinger , a popular web hosting provider and its subsidiary, Zyro , a website builder , rival to Wix . It is also well documented that Tesonet has helped another
VPN, ProtonVPN in the past. Read more

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While it is unclear how NordVPN and Surfshark work together today, Verslo inios also revealed that Surfshark will move to Cyber City, an upcoming tech campus in Vilnius, Lithuania that Tesonet and NordVPN have said that they
will be moving to as well.

Consolidation has been a trend in the VPN market as of late. Kape Technologies, owner of both CyberGhost and Private Internet Access , recently purchased rival ExpressVPN in the industrys largest merger.

J2Global owns six VPN brands, including IPVanish and StrongVPN . Nord
Security also made a recent acquisition in Atlas VPN . However, the links between NordVPN and Surfshark were previously unknown and seemingly sidestepped when questioned. Sure. The clear answer to both questions is no. Actually, we're thinking of developing our own whitelabel as we see demand
for such service August 12, 2020 See more

We have reached out to Surfshark and NordVPN for comment and will update this article if necessary. Here's the best business VPN around



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/surfshark-founder-reveals-ties-to-nordvpn-and-t esonet/


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