Why Via?

To us, those values are privacy, dignity, freedom, transparency and accountability. In the digital world, they should mean that people remain in control of their personal lives, private conversations are not treated as commercial resources, and technology companies are accountable to the societies in which they operate.

That is also why we strongly oppose EU Chat Control. We do not believe that scanning people’s private communications or weakening encryption represents European values. Protecting people online is essential, but it should not come at the cost of everyone’s right to privacy and secure communication.

Today, much of our digital life is controlled by a small number of enormous companies. We depend on their platforms to speak to our families, organise our lives and share our most personal moments. Yet these companies were built elsewhere, around values and business models that are not necessarily our own.

We are spending our own money and time on Via because we genuinely believe it needs to exist. We did not start with the idea that the world simply needed another messaging app. We started with a personal frustration: why do we have so little choice over the technology we use for our most private conversations? We could complain about it, or we could try to build something better.

Via is being built with privacy as its foundation, not as a feature or a marketing slogan. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted, message history remains on your device, and we collect only the information necessary to operate the service. We are not building an advertising platform, and we do not believe your private life should become a product.

Building Via in Europe means more than registering a company here or putting a European flag on our website. It means translating the values we believe in into the technology itself. Europe is not simply another market for Via. It is our home.

We know what we are taking on. We are four people from a small country attempting to create an alternative to some of the most powerful companies in the world. But every meaningful alternative has to begin somewhere. For us, it begins in Slovenia, Europe, with our own money, our own time and a belief that Europe can build a digital future of its own.