Who Owns Signal? Ownership Structure, Board and Funding (2026)

Signal is owned by the Signal Technology Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Mountain View, California. The foundation holds 100% of Signal Messenger LLC, the company that builds the app. There are no shareholders and no valuation. The foundation reported $29.4 million in revenue for 2024.

Signal ownership at a glance

Who owns Signal today?

Signal Messenger LLC has one member: the Signal Technology Foundation. The stake is 100%, and there is no second class of equity, no venture investor, and no employee share pool.

Staff are paid in salary rather than equity. The foundation reported $15,793,331 in salaries and wages plus $1,404,888 in executive compensation for 2024, according to its IRS Form 990 filed in September 2025.

Brian Acton put $105,000,400 into the organization, but that money is structured as a loan rather than an investment. He is the largest creditor, not a shareholder. Total liabilities stood at $35,719,745 against $30,994,770 in assets at the end of 2024.

The arrangement resembles the nonprofit parent that sits above OpenAI, with one difference: Signal’s subsidiary has no outside capital at all.

Who owns the Signal Foundation?

No one owns it. A 501(c)(3) has no shareholders or members with financial claims, so control sits entirely with the board of directors.

The board has five members: Amba Kak, Brian Acton, Jay Sullivan, Katherine Maher and Meredith Whittaker. Moxie Marlinspike, who created Signal, holds emeritus status and left the board in February 2023.

Acton is executive chairman and appears on the 2024 return as president, secretary, treasurer and CEO of Signal, taking $0 in compensation. Whittaker, president since September 2022, received $743,531 plus $51,697 in other compensation for 2024. Concentration of authority in a small board is common among mission-locked organizations, including the trust that appoints Anthropic’s directors.

What else does the Signal Foundation own?

Signal Messenger LLC is its only subsidiary. The foundation also holds the Signal name and logos as registered trademarks, along with the codebase and the Signal Protocol implementation.

Protocol licensing has produced royalty income in past years: $2,009,245 in 2022 and $1,270,012 in 2023. The 2024 return reported no royalty revenue and $6,386,666 in program service revenue instead.

Who are the biggest investors in Signal?

Signal has no equity investors. The closest equivalents are its lender and its donor base.

• Brian Acton: $50 million announced on February 21, 2018, later raised to $105,000,400. The loan is unsecured, carries 0% interest and matures on February 28, 2068.
• Individual donors: contributions of $21,843,492 in 2024, or 74.3% of revenue.
• Open Technology Fund: close to $3 million to the predecessor project between 2013 and 2016.
• Knight Foundation and Shuttleworth Foundation: grants over the same period, when Freedom of the Press Foundation acted as fiscal sponsor.

Spending has outpaced income since 2021. Whittaker and developer Joshua Lund wrote in November 2023 that infrastructure alone cost about $14 million a year and that total costs were expected to reach roughly $50 million by 2025.

Is Signal publicly traded?

No. Signal has no ticker and no listing on any exchange. A 501(c)(3) cannot issue stock, so a conventional IPO is not available to it.

Neither the foundation nor Signal Messenger has raised the prospect of going public, and no conversion to a for-profit structure has been announced. That separates Signal from the private companies now queued for listings and from listed platforms such as Pinterest, where institutional funds hold most of the stock.

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