We built a company around not knowing you.
Avano is founder-led and self-funded. There is no venture capital, no board, and no data business — which is the point, because a data business is a set of records somebody can come and ask for.
Some things are nobody else's business.
Encrypting what you say is a solved problem. What is still exposed is who you talk to, when, and how often — the pattern that is the map of a life, and the part that legal orders actually collect, because it is the part that exists to collect.
Our mission is to shrink that pattern by design, at the network layer, so there is far less for anyone to gather — and to do it in something a person who has never thought about the word “encryption” can use.
We do not invent our own cryptography. We build on audited foundations and do the new work where it counts: metadata, the network, and the way it feels to use. And we say what Avano cannot do as plainly as what it can.
Do not claim what you have not checked.
That sentence is the first line of the document every person and process working on this codebase has to read before touching anything, and it is not a slogan. It exists because of a specific, recurring, humiliating defect: a defence that is designed, implemented, documented, tested — and called by nobody. Eighteen instances of it were found in a single day's review. Every one had passing tests, because the tests called the code even when nothing else did.
Cover traffic. The transparency log. The signed relay directory. The two-relay split. The passphrase lock. At one point, persistent storage itself. Each of them was, at some moment, described somewhere as working.
Three habits came out of that, and they now govern this website exactly as they govern the code:
- Name the adversary next to the claim. Never “the server cannot learn X”. Say who cannot learn it, from what they observe. The single most productive question anyone asks here is "which adversary does this test model?" — and the answer has repeatedly been weaker than the one the specification defined two files away.
- Assert the property, not something that implies it. If the claim is that a key left memory, scan memory — do not check that a flag flipped. If the claim is that a seizure yields nothing, scan the file's bytes — do not query the columns.
- Watch it fail before you trust it. A regression test nobody has seen fail proves nothing. And there is a step zero people skip: confirm the break you introduced was actually applied, because a no-op edit and a correct test produce identical output.
When a claim turns out to be false we correct it in place, with the mechanism, and record why the wrong version looked right — because that last part is what stops the next person reintroducing it. Several comments in this codebase are longer than the code they describe for exactly that reason.
An overstated security claim is worse than no claim, because a user acts on it. That is not a figure of speech here: one of our own documents once promised something was "cryptographically impossible to prove", and a person who believed that sentence might have held out under coercion on the strength of something that was true about a data structure and false about a phone.
Four principles we don't bend.
Audited foundations
Message encryption is unmodified libsignal, including its post-quantum ratchet. We do the new work around it, never inside it. Rolling your own cipher is how amateurs are identified.
Say what we can't do
We publish the threat model, the residual leaks, and the list of claims you cannot verify. The pages that do that are the ones we put first, not last.
A good refusal beats a fix
Some features cannot be built without breaking the product. We would rather write the argument down than ship the feature and describe it carefully. The list →
Usable or it doesn't count
Security only an expert can operate protects only experts. If it is not effortless it is not finished — and every trade-off on this site is measured against a person, not a specification.
Small, independent, and hard to lean on.
Avano is founder-led and self-funded. Money goes to infrastructure — relays, bridges, domains — and there are no salaries and no agencies. There is no outside investor, no board, and nothing that could be acquired without the founder agreeing to it.
Being small is part of the threat model, not a stage we are hoping to grow out of: less to subpoena, less to acquire, less to lean on. It is also a genuine weakness in other directions, and we set those out rather than only the flattering half — one operator, one jurisdiction in use, no legal counsel yet, no organisational shield between the founder and an order, and an anonymity set that is currently very small. The full comparison against Signal →
How it will be funded
The messenger is free and stays free. There is no advertising, nothing is sold, and there is essentially nothing that could be sold — the data does not exist.
Cover traffic is free too, and that is a deliberate reversal of an earlier decision. It was going to be a paid feature. The argument that changed it is not generosity: a privacy lane you have to buy marks the people who bought it. If only subscribers carry constant traffic, a relay reads the constant rate straight off the queue and does not need to break anything to find them — and people who pay for anonymity are, on average, people with more to hide. Anonymity is a property of a crowd, and a crowd you have to buy your way into is not one.
If a paid tier exists it will sell things that do not change your traffic shape. How payment could work without identifying the payer →
The honest inventory.
A company page usually ends with momentum. This one ends with the balance sheet.
- A pre-release Android build carrying the full messaging flow over Tor.
- A live relay, onion-only, holding nothing on disk. A second deployed and not yet in use.
- A metadata design that is genuinely ahead of the field, and the engineering documentation to back it.
- Post-quantum message encryption at parity with the best available.
- Cover traffic actually running, which no shipping rival has at all.
- A release signing key. Every build we have made is signed with a development key.
- Published source, a published build manifest, and a public log. Nobody can verify anything.
- An independent audit of any of our own work.
- An iOS app that carries messages.
- A legal entity, counsel, and every legal document on this site in a reviewed form.
- Users. A privacy product with few users offers little privacy, and only growth fixes that.