Who Owns Your VPN? The Consolidation Map Nobody Shows You

By the VPNUncovered team · Checked 26 August 2026

The point of this page. You put four VPN brands on a shortlist and you think you are comparing four companies. Sometimes you are comparing one. None of this is illegal and most of it is disclosed somewhere. It is just never disclosed on the page where you are choosing. So here it is, with dates and sources you can check.

We should say our own part first. We earn a commission when someone signs up through our links. That is how this site pays for itself. If we are going to hold anyone else to a disclosure standard, we have to start with ourselves, so the full arrangement is on our affiliate disclosure page.

One company, four brands

Kape Technologies owns CyberGhost, ZenMate, Private Internet Access and ExpressVPN. It bought them in that order: CyberGhost in 2017, ZenMate in 2018, Private Internet Access in 2019, and ExpressVPN in 2021.

The ExpressVPN deal was proposed in September 2021 at $936 million and completed in December 2021. That is the largest single transaction in this market that has been made public.

The company's history is the part most write-ups skip. Kape started in 2011 as Crossrider, a browser-extension SDK business. Per the public record of the company, Crossrider's monetisation tooling "was used by major ad injectors which used man-in-the-browser" techniques and "became increasingly utilized by malware and adware developers". New management moved the company into cybersecurity and VPNs in June 2016 and discontinued the browser SDK business.

That is a genuine turnaround, not a hidden crime, and the company has said so openly. But it is context you would want when a privacy product asks for your trust, and it is not on any of the four brands' homepages.

The same company bought the sites that review them

This is the fact that changed how we read VPN "best of" lists.

On 8 March 2021, Kape announced it had acquired Webselenese for total consideration of US$149.1 million — $116.6 million in cash plus $32.5 million in new shares. Webselenese is the parent of two VPN review sites: vpnMentor and Wizcase. At the time of the deal they were described as drawing roughly 6.8 million visitors a month (Ahrefs, May 2021).

So a company that owns four VPN brands spent nearly $150 million on two of the websites that review VPN brands. To their credit, both sites now carry a Kape ownership disclosure near the top of the page. You can open either one right now and see it. Most readers never scroll to it, and no search result mentions it.

Kape is not alone in this shape. Ziff Davis owns IPVanish and StrongVPN through its NetProtect division. The same corporate parent owns PCMag, Mashable and IGN — outlets that publish VPN reviews, including of its own brands. Those relationships are documented on the outlets' own ownership pages.

And then the accounts went private

Kape used to be a publicly listed company, which meant it filed public accounts anyone could read. That changed in 2023.

Unikmind Holdings, controlled by Teddy Sagi, announced a cash offer for Kape on 13 February 2023 at US$3.44 per share, already holding around 54.8% of the company. The offer was raised to US$3.60 per share on 20 April 2023 and declared unconditional on 26 April 2023, with roughly 98.54% acceptance. Kape was delisted from the LSE AIM market by 31 May 2023, valuing its equity at about US$1.58 billion.

Going private is a normal, legal corporate decision. The consequence for you is simple: there are no longer public annual accounts to read for the company behind four VPN brands.

The second consolidation: Nord and Surfshark

On 2 February 2022, Nord Security (NordVPN's parent) and Surfshark announced they had merged under a single holding company. Both companies state that they continue to operate autonomously, with separate infrastructures and separate product roadmaps, and we have no evidence to the contrary.

We are deliberately not naming the combined holding entity or its country here. The name and domicile that circulate online come from secondary reporting we could not confirm against the original announcement, and this is a page about accuracy.

The honest framing: a merger is a disclosure point, not proof of harm. But if you were about to put NordVPN and Surfshark side by side as your two independent finalists, you should know they answer to the same owner. That is exactly the kind of thing a comparison table is supposed to tell you.

At the free end, ownership is often hidden outright

Everything above is disclosed somewhere. Down in the free app charts, it frequently is not.

The Tech Transparency Project published an investigation on 1 April 2025 finding that 20 of the top 100 free VPN apps in the US App Store during 2024 had Chinese ownership ties that were not disclosed to users. Those apps were downloaded more than 70 million times from US app stores. Several traced to Qihoo 360 through shell companies named Lemon Seed, Lemon Clove and Autumn Breeze, including Turbo VPN, VPN Proxy Master and Thunder VPN. Qihoo 360 was sanctioned by the US Commerce Department in June 2020. A follow-up spot check by the same group in June 2025 reported that Apple had removed three Qihoo-linked apps while 13 apps from the April report remained available, some under new names.

Top10VPN found the same pattern earlier. In an investigation updated 18 June 2020, it reported that of the 20 most popular free mobile VPN apps in the US, 10 were Chinese-owned and four more had suspected mainland China links — 14 in total, with over 223 million global installs. Twelve had substandard or worse privacy policies, and two had no VPN-specific privacy policy at all.

If hidden ownership is your concern, the free charts are where it lives. We go through that evidence in detail in are free VPNs safe.

We recommend a Kape-owned VPN. Here is why that is still defensible

CyberGhost is owned by Kape. We recommend it anyway, in specific slots, and we would rather explain that than quietly drop it to look consistent.

Ownership is one input, not a verdict. A brand with a disclosed owner and checkable terms is a better bet than an app with no owner you can name at all. What we weigh:

• The owner is knowable. You can look it up in one search, which is more than you can say for most of the free chart.
• The refund window is long enough to test. CyberGhost offers a 45-day money-back guarantee on its 6-month and 26-month plans, and 14 days on the 1-month plan (checked 26 Aug 2026). The 14-day figure matters — a lot of write-ups quote the 45 days and never mention that the monthly plan is different.
• Seven devices on one account (checked 26 Aug 2026).
• Published audits are a claim to check, not a fact we can hand you. CyberGhost points to independent audits of its systems. We have not personally reviewed those reports, so treat them as something to open on their site and read before you buy, the same as any price.

We do not print a US price for CyberGhost anywhere on this site right now, because we could not verify US figures on the date we checked. If you want to see how it lines up against our general-use pick, we compare them directly in NordVPN vs CyberGhost, and the full write-up is in our CyberGhost review.

Five questions to ask before you buy any VPN

1. Who owns this brand, and can I find out in one search? If the answer is no, that is the answer.
2. Does the site recommending it disclose its own money? Commission is fine. Hidden commission is not.
3. Does the reviewer share an owner with the product? Check the disclosure at the top of the review site.
4. Is the renewal price on the page? Not the intro price — the renewal.
5. How long is the refund window, on the exact plan I am buying? Windows often differ between monthly and long plans.

That last one is the practical trick in this whole article. You cannot audit a no-logs claim from your sofa. You can buy the shortest plan with the longest refund window, use it for two weeks, and decide.

Work out which one fits you

Our quiz asks five questions about what you actually want a VPN for, then gives you a pick, a runner-up and a budget option — with the owner named and the date we last checked the terms. No email required.

Take the 60-second VPN quiz →