Abine, Inc.

Who owns Abine, Inc.?

Abine is privately owned by its founders and private investors. Co-founder Rob Shavell leads the company as CEO. No parent company or controlling institutional shareholder is on record.

Is Abine a public company?

No. Abine, Inc. is privately held with no stock listing. Its products, including DeleteMe, operate as brands of the private company.

When was Abine founded?

Abine was founded in Boston around 2009 by Rob Shavell, Eugene Kuznetsov, and Andrew Sudbury. Its flagship product DeleteMe launched in 2010.

What does Abine own?

Abine owns DeleteMe, the data removal service; Blur, a password manager and masked payments tool; Block Party, an online safety product acquired in March 2026; and Permission Slip, the data rights app acquired from Consumer Reports in July 2026.

Where is Abine headquartered?

Abine is headquartered at 1 Marina Park Drive in Boston, Massachusetts, with additional operations historically in Somerville.

How does Abine make money?

Revenue comes from DeleteMe subscriptions for individuals, families, and businesses, plus the smaller Blur product line and the acquired Permission Slip and Block Party services.

Abine was founded in Boston in 2009 by Rob Shavell, Eugene Kuznetsov, and Andrew Sudbury. The founding insight was that personal information was spreading across the internet faster than individuals could track it, and that the opt-out processes data brokers offered were deliberately burdensome.

The company's first product focus was browser-based privacy tooling, which became Blur, a combined password manager, masked email service, and masked payments card. Blur established the company's technical footing in consumer privacy but remained a smaller line than what followed.

DeleteMe launched in 2010 as a paid removal service: subscribers provided their details, and the company found matching profiles across people-search sites and data brokers, submitted opt-out requests, and reported what was removed. The labor-intensive version of that process, human agents handling resistant brokers, became a durability feature rather than a cost problem, since automated-only competitors struggled with the same brokers that defeated scripts.

The service grew as US state privacy law proliferated. Each new statute expanding consumer data rights widened the addressable problem DeleteMe solves. By the mid-2020s DeleteMe had become Abine's dominant product, the category's recognized brand, and a fixture of security journalism recommendations.

Two acquisitions in 2026 reshaped the company's scope. In March it bought Block Party, which built tools for online safety and protection against social media harassment. On July 30, 2026, DeleteMe announced the acquisition of Permission Slip, the consumer privacy app built by nonprofit Consumer Reports. Permission Slip had processed nearly 5 million data rights requests across more than 400 companies since 2022, and the deal transferred operations to DeleteMe while keeping the app live for existing users. The combined platform now covers broker removals, company-direct deletion requests, and online safety in one subscription umbrella.

Abine's core product is an ethical posture commercialized: it exists because the data broker industry's practices create the demand. The company monetizes consumer protection rather than user data, runs no advertising, and its revenue scales only when removals work.

On governance, the Permission Slip transition was structured to protect existing users: accounts, subscriptions, and pending requests continued uninterrupted, with Consumer Reports publicly endorsing DeleteMe as the successor operator. That endorsement from a nonprofit watchdog is the company's strongest third-party credibility marker.

• Consumer Reports partnership: Selected to acquire and operate Permission Slip in 2026, a de facto endorsement of DeleteMe's category leadership
• Editorial recognition: Repeated top rankings in Wirecutter, PCMag, and security press for data removal
• Category creation: Credited in industry coverage with defining consumer data removal in 2010

Abine has no regulatory actions, fines, or major controversies on public record. The category-level criticism that applies is structural: brokers relist data after removal, which makes protection perpetual rather than one-time, and technically capable users can file opt-outs themselves at no cost. DeleteMe's response is continuous monitoring coverage and agent-handled removals for brokers that defeat automation.

The Permission Slip acquisition raised the predictable question of whether commercial ownership changes a consumer advocacy tool's character. Consumer Reports stated operations would continue unchanged and that it remains committed to privacy advocacy separately.