🎂 Today marks ten years since we incorporated Bernstein Technologies GmbH in Munich. Today, we're IP LEVERAGED SAS, headquartered in Strasbourg. In between: a lot happened.
We weren't wrong about blockchain and IP. We were perhaps a little optimistic about how quickly the rest of the world would get there. Building a category before the category really has a name requires a particular kind of conviction. It also requires patience. We ended up needing plenty of both.
We were equally stubborn about another principle: your data is yours, full stop. Bernstein was designed so that we never see the plaintext of what you upload. Encryption happens client-side, in your browser, before anything reaches us. It's an elegant principle. Technically, it's a demanding one. Sharing, search, collaboration, support - almost every feature has to be designed around infrastructure that is deliberately kept in the dark. That choice has made parts of the product harder to build over the years, but it remains one of the decisions we're most proud of. And, of course, we'd do it again.
And then there was everything that doesn't fit neatly into a pitch deck. Economic turbulence. The normal tensions and difficult decisions that come with building a company over many years. A pandemic that disrupted much of the world while we kept developing. And eventually, the considerable challenge of moving a company, its technology and its operations from one country to another, from Munich to Strasbourg, while preserving what mattered and rebuilding what needed to change. There were detours, difficult periods, experiments that worked and others that didn't.
And yet - here we are. Ten years later, we're still building, still improving the product and still helping innovators establish evidence around the ideas, creations, know-how and intellectual assets that matter to them. That continuity means something to us.
But perhaps the best thing to come out of these ten years isn't a product milestone at all. Somewhere along the way, we became friends. Not simply former colleagues or co-founders who managed to stay on speaking terms, but actual friends who happen to have spent a decade building something together. That's probably rarer than any startup metric.
And now, the world around Bernstein is changing again. AI is making software, content, designs and research dramatically easier to create, reproduce and transform. At the same time, it is making questions around provenance, ownership, confidentiality and evidence more important than ever. The more intellectual property we create, the more important it becomes to establish where it came from, who controlled it, and when it existed.
That makes the mission we started with ten years ago feel more relevant than ever: make meaningful IP protection accessible to innovators, wherever they are and whatever they're building - not only to organisations with large legal budgets and dedicated patent departments. The technology around us may have changed dramatically. The need Bernstein set out to address has only become clearer.
We may have been early in 2016. Perhaps, as it turns out, right on time for the next ten.
Happy 10th anniversary, Bernstein. 🍾