New Vector Ltd.

New Vector Ltd.
Name	New Vector Ltd.
Type	Private
Industry	Software
Founded	2016
Founder	Matthew Hodgson; Amandine Le Pape
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Products	Element (formerly Riot), Matrix protocol implementations
Num employees	100–300 (2024)

New Vector Ltd. is a privately held technology company founded in 2016 that develops client software and services for the open standard Matrix protocol. The company is best known for the Element client and for operating infrastructure that supports federated real-time communication across the internet. New Vector Ltd. has engaged with a range of open source projects, standards bodies, and commercial partners to advance interoperable messaging and decentralised communication.

History

New Vector Ltd. was established by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape following work on the Matrix project with contributors associated with Open Whisper Systems, Mozilla, and the University of Cambridge. In its early years the company interacted with communities around Freenode, The Eclipse Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation while collaborating with projects such as Riot (which later became Element), Synapse, and Dendrite. New Vector participated in events and conferences including FOSDEM, IETF meetings, and the Open Source Summit, and attracted attention from organizations like Europol, the UK National Cyber Security Centre, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for its role in decentralised messaging. Over time New Vector expanded operations in London and engaged with investor networks connected to Balderton Capital, Accel, and Index Ventures for minority funding rounds while also coordinating with the Matrix.org Foundation, Wikimedia, and Canonical on interoperability efforts.

Products and Services

New Vector’s flagship offering is the Element client family, which includes Element Web, Element Desktop, and Element Mobile, used by communities such as KDE, GNOME, Wikimedia, and Wikimedia-related projects to enable chat and collaboration. The company provides managed hosting and enterprise services including hosting for public sector deployments like those used by the French government, deployments interoperable with Microsoft Teams and Slack via bridges, and integrations for GitHub, GitLab, and Jitsi Meet. New Vector also offers commercial support, professional services, and training that appeal to customers including CERN, Mozilla, and the European Commission. Complementary projects and integrations link to projects such as Matrix Synapse, Dendrite, RiotX, and bridges to Telegram, IRC, and Signal-compatible infrastructures.

Corporate Structure and Ownership

New Vector is privately held and structured as a limited company based in London, with executive leadership including founders who previously collaborated with teams at Amdocs and Skype. Its governance has involved coordination with the Matrix.org Foundation, an independent non-profit established to steward the Matrix protocol alongside stakeholders such as Collabora, Red Hat, and Nextcloud. Investors and strategic partners have included venture firms and angel backers known for funding open source and communications companies; New Vector’s ownership reflects a mix of founder equity and external minority stakes rather than a single corporate parent like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. The company has maintained advisory ties with figures from the Free Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and advisory boards linked to the IETF and W3C.

Technology and Platforms

New Vector develops client applications built on web technologies and native frameworks that implement the Matrix open standard, which itself intersects with protocols and projects such as WebRTC, OAuth, and the ActivityPub ecosystem used by Mastodon and PeerTube. The company contributes to server-side implementations including Synapse (Python) and Dendrite (Go), and interfaces with databases and message brokers like PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ in deployments similar to those used by GitHub, Twitter, and Facebook for scale. Element clients provide end-to-end encryption based on Olm and Megolm cryptographic ratchets related to work from Open Whisper Systems and Signal Protocol, and integrate with federated identity providers and single sign-on systems such as LDAP, SAML, and OAuth2 used by enterprises like Microsoft and Google. New Vector’s engineering approach references practices used by projects such as Kubernetes, Docker, and Prometheus for observability, deployment, and container orchestration.

Privacy, Security, and Governance

New Vector has emphasized privacy and security by implementing end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, and device verification mechanisms inspired by Signal and double-ratchet designs. The company collaborates with security auditors and organisations including NCC Group, CISA, and independent academic researchers from institutions such as ETH Zurich, University College London, and the University of Oxford for penetration testing and cryptographic review. Governance of the Matrix protocol involves the Matrix.org Foundation, where New Vector participates alongside stakeholders like Mozilla, The Linux Foundation, and the European Commission to establish moderation, data retention, and federation policies that echo frameworks discussed at the Council of Europe and in the GDPR context with authorities such as the European Data Protection Supervisor.

Partnerships and Funding

New Vector has formed partnerships with enterprise and open source organizations including Canonical, Red Hat, Collabora, Nextcloud, and Jitsi that enable joint deployments and integrations with services offered by Salesforce, Atlassian, and Microsoft. The company has engaged with public sector clients and consortia across NATO member states and EU institutions through procurement processes similar to those used by IBM and Accenture, and has participated in research collaborations with academic labs at Imperial College London and ETH Zurich. Funding sources have included venture capital and strategic investment rounds involving firms from the European technology sector as well as grants and in-kind support from foundations promoting decentralised technologies, analogous to support models seen with the Mozilla Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation.

Category:Software companies of the United Kingdom Category:Instant messaging clients