ExpressVPN is a VPN service offered by the British Virgin Islands-registered company Express Technologies Ltd. The software is marketed as a privacy and security tool that encrypts users' web traffic and masks their IP addresses. As of September 2021, ExpressVPN is owned by Kape Technologies and reportedly has 4 million users. History ExpressVPN's parent company, Express VPN International Ltd, was founded in 2009 by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantz, two serial entrepreneurs who were also Wharton School alumni. The parent company does business as ExpressVPN. On January 25, 2016, ExpressVPN announced that it would soon roll out an upgraded CA certificate. Also in December, ExpressVPN released open source leak testing tools on GitHub. In July 2017, ExpressVPN announced in an open letter that Apple had removed all VPN apps from its App Store in China, a revelation that was later picked up by The New York Times and other outlets. In response to questions from U.S. Senators, Apple stated it had removed 674 VPN apps from the App Store in China in 2017 at the request of the Chinese government. In December, ExpressVPN came into the spotlight in relation to the investigation of the assassination of Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov. Turkish investigators seized an ExpressVPN server which they say was used to delete relevant information from the assassin's Gmail and Facebook accounts. Turkish authorities were unable to find any logs to aid their investigation, which the company said verified its claim that it did not store user activity or connection logs, adding; "while it's unfortunate that security tools like VPNs can be abused for illicit purposes, they are critical for our safety and the preservation of our right to privacy online. ExpressVPN is fundamentally opposed to any efforts to install 'backdoors' or attempts by governments to otherwise undermine such technologies." In December 2019, ExpressVPN became a founding member of the VPN Trust Initiative, an advocacy group for online safety of consumers. In May 2020, the company released a new protocol it developed for ExpressVPN called Lightway, designed to improve connectivity speeds and reduce power consumption. In October, Yale Privacy Lab founder Sean O'Brien joined the ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab to conduct original research in the areas of privacy and cybersecurity. On September 13, 2021, it was reported that ExpressVPN had been acquired by Kape Technologies, an LSE-listed digital privacy and security company. At the time of the acquisition,