Who Owns Sync?

Thomas Savundra, Suhan Shan, and Darius Antia founded Sync in October 2011 in Toronto, about three years before the Snowden disclosures made encrypted cloud services a mainstream topic. The founders had previously built and sold web hosting infrastructure and wanted a file storage product they could use without handing a service provider the keys to their data.

Sync spent roughly two years in development building end-to-end encrypted apps and storage infrastructure before launching publicly in the summer of 2013 under the name Sync.com. The architecture encrypts files on the user's device before upload, meaning Sync's own employees cannot decrypt customer content. All data is stored in Canadian data centers, which the company argues adds Canadian privacy law protections on top of the encryption itself.

The service grew steadily through the 2010s, adding shared folders, secure link sharing, file versioning, and team administration. By its tenth anniversary in 2021, Sync reported 2.2 million users and 8 billion files stored. The company marked the milestone with unlimited storage plans, desktop, mobile, and web apps, and compliance certifications including SOC 2 and SOC 3 audits.

Through the mid-2020s Sync positioned itself as the privacy-first counterpoint to Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive, appearing in independent cloud storage reviews as the leading encrypted option for consumers and small businesses. The service added compliance coverage for GDPR, HIPAA, and PIPEDA, expanded file recovery windows to 365 days on paid plans, and introduced features including Sync Vault cold storage, remote device lockout, and custom branding for business teams.

Sync remains private and founder-operated. It has never taken a disclosed acquisition offer or institutional round, a rarity among cloud storage providers of comparable visibility.