Onin
The world’s first end-to-end encrypted calendar and chat app
Funding stage: Seed
What is it?
Onin is a mobile-first calendar app designed to create a seamless way to make and organise plans in one single, secure place. Most digital calendars have been built for companies, not consumers. Currently conversations happen on many different platforms and everyone’s calendars are out of sync.
Onin has built its solution from the ground up, with a two-tab system to connect calendar and chat. This creates a secure, slick, simple and seamless consumer scheduling experience.
We’ve investigated many different calendar apps and Onin’s consumer-first user experience, combined with its chat/calendar connection and unique end-to-end encryption, make it the best, truly pioneering solution we’ve seen.
Why we like it
Consumer privacy is rapidly becoming a crucial part of interacting online and we believe end-to-end encryption will soon be a required standard in all communication tools. When WhatsApp revealed that it collects and shares certain data with its parent company, despite end-to-end encryption, 25 million users migrated to alternative messaging service Telegram in just three days.
That shows what an important issue privacy is to consumers. Privacy-first apps such as the Duckduckgo search engine and Brave’s private browser, which already has 50 million monthly active users, are growing rapidy. There are also end-to-end encrypted versions of DocuSign, Excel or Google Docs. Onin is the first of its kind for calendar and chat.
The current market for digital calendars represents 3.5 billion users, while some 5.5 billion people use end-to-end encrypted chat apps – 20% more than social networks*. This is a very competitive market and we believe Onin’s unique security, functionality and design give it the strength to stand out.
*Company research, Onin 2022
What our fund managers say
“Ryan is one of the most thoughtful, world class product CEOs I have ever met. He has really thought about the last mile of the user journey, sawing the sharp edges off the calendaring experience.”
– Rebecca Hunt – Partner
Who are we backing?
The founder, Ryan Brodie, previously founded three other businesses including Muzz (formerly Muzmatch), the dating app for Muslims. He helped grow that to 1.5 million monthly active users and £5 million in revenue. Previous to that he worked as a software engineer at ASOS, giving him a strong understanding of best in class practices alongside his entrepreneurial DNA.
Ryan is a true product visionary with strong conviction and a supreme ability to sell the vision, which is essential for a consumer product that is challenging the establishment. The founding CTO, David Adler, is a full stack engineer who previously co-founded his own social music discovery start-up.