About us

Rooted in open-source culture, engineering for enterprise use

ownCloud develops and provides open-source software for content collaboration, allowing teams to easily share and work on files seamlessly regardless of device or location.

More than 200 million users worldwide already use ownCloud as an alternative to public clouds – and thereby opt for more digital sovereignty, security and data protection.

Installations

Users

Enterprise customers

History

ownCloud was founded by in 2010 as an open-source project to host and sync files, and 2011 as a company to support institutional customers. In 2012, ownCloud landed the first paying customer. As an open alternative to services like Dropbox, it quickly became one of the most popular open-source projects in the world with more than 1,000 contributors. In 2014, ownCloud received a funding round of 6,3 million dollars and passed the mark of 1 million users. In 2016, one of three co-founders, Frank Karlitschek, left the company, forked the project and started his own firm to pursue another vision.

Lead by its new CEO Tobias Gerlinger and co-founder and COO Holger Dyroff, ownCloud GmbH in Nuremberg (Germany) then sharpened its focus to become the most stable, most secure open-source software for content collaboration. The product: professional service for projects of any size and any complexity.

The team committed itself to make open source work for the corporate realm and large scientific endeavours – not despite being open source, but because of it. ownCloud incrementally improved on its core, added features, integrations and fortified its Enterprise Edition.

In 2018, ownCloud was included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms (CCP) as the only open-source software in the world.

In 2019, ownCloud became available as a service at ownCloud.online, tailored to meet the needs of small and medium businesses.

Today, working mostly remote, roughly 75 staff at ownCloud develop and support the market-leading open-source content collaboration software. It allows groups of people in companies, schools, institutions and government to seamlessly share and work on files regardless of device or location. More than 500 enterprise customers and a grand total of 200 million users worldwide already use ownCloud as an alternative to public clouds – and thereby opt for more digital sovereignty, security and data protection.

The near future will see the introduction of ownCloud Infinite Scale, a new ownCloud rewritten from the ground up in Go, as well as a new, decoupled user interface based on Vue.js. Those innovations make ownCloud even more stable, secure and fast.

Who we are

We live our mission to put digital sovereignty back into the hands of individuals and companies. We start with our product and develop software we are passionate about. Our team consists of dedicated, smart people working towards digital collaboration for today and tomorrow.