Mullvad VPN

Mullvad VPN is a Swedish privacy VPN operated by Mullvad VPN AB (Gothenburg, reg. 559238-4001) beneath its parent Amagicom AB, which the two founders, Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson, own outright. They have published a standing refusal to take venture capital or go public, and say they have turned down several acquisition offers. The service launched in March 2009; the Swedish filings for 2025 report SEK 381 million of revenue and 53 employees.

Signup is an account number and nothing else — no email address, no name, no password. The price is a flat EUR 5 a month whether you buy one month or ten years, unchanged since 2009, with no free tier and no sales. Payment can be cash sent by post, Bitcoin, Monero, bank transfer or card. Apps cover Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android over WireGuard, with multi-hop, post-quantum tunnels on by default since February 2025, and DAITA, a defence against traffic analysis. Every relay in the fleet runs from RAM with no persistent storage, and roughly a fifth of the servers are hardware Mullvad owns rather than rents.

Two things to weigh against the incumbents. Port forwarding was withdrawn in May 2023 after abuse complaints and has not returned. And the fleet is deliberately small — around 550 relays in 50 countries, against the thousands the large consumer VPNs advertise. When Swedish police arrived at the Gothenburg office with a search warrant in April 2023 they left with nothing, because the customer data they came for does not exist.

Mullvad VPN AB is registered in Sweden under organisationsnummer 559238-4001 at Engelbrektsgatan 28 in Gothenburg. It sits under the parent Amagicom AB, a name built from ama-gi — the oldest written word for freedom — and an abbreviation of communication, and both companies are wholly owned by founders Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson, who still work in the business. There is no outside investor. Swedish accounts are public, and the filing for the year to December 2025 shows SEK 381 million of revenue, SEK 62 million of profit after net financial items and 53 employees.

The VPN launched in March 2009. Mullvad now also ships the Mullvad Browser, built with the Tor Project and released in April 2023, which gives Tor Browser’s fingerprinting defences without routing over the Tor network, and Leta, a search front-end released two months later. DAITA, its defence against AI-guided traffic analysis, arrived in May 2024, and quantum-resistant WireGuard became the default on every platform in February 2025. Mozilla, Malwarebytes and Tailscale have all resold or used its server network.

The account model is the product. You get a randomly generated account number with no email address and no name, and you pay month by month — card, bank transfer, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning, Monero, or cash sent through the post. Recurring subscriptions were dropped in 2022 specifically to hold less data, and the migration to RAM-only servers completed in September 2023. Independent audits have covered the apps, the infrastructure, the Android build and the website, most recently by NCC Group in March 2025, and Android builds are reproducible. The network runs about 566 servers in 50 countries, and the public server list names the hosting provider for each machine and marks whether Mullvad owns or rents it.