Who Owns Your VPN? The 2026 Ownership & Jurisdiction Map

The VPN industry sells trust. Yet most people who pay for a VPN can't name the company that actually controls it — and the industry works hard to keep it that way. Brands change hands quietly, "competitors" turn out to be siblings, and the review sites that crown the winners are, in several documented cases, owned by the same conglomerates that own the VPNs being crowned.

We verified the ownership of 28 consumer VPN brands against company registries, SEC filings, official press releases, and the companies' own disclosures (all checked July 3, 2026). Here is the map.

The Conglomerates: Eight Parents, Twenty-Plus Brands

The Pattern That Should Worry You: VPNs Buying Their Own Critics

The single most consequential fact on this page: three of the industry's biggest VPN owners also own VPN review media.

• Kape Technologies paid $149.1 million in March 2021 for Webselenese — the company behind vpnMentor, Wizcase, and Safety Detectives. Those sites review and rank ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, and PIA, all owned by Kape.
• Point Wild (then Aura) acquired Comparitech and ProPrivacy in 2021 for an estimated $50–100 million. Comparitech reviews Hotspot Shield and Betternet — both Point Wild products.
• Ziff Davis owns IPVanish and StrongVPN in one division, and PCMag, Mashable, and IGN — publications that review VPNs — in another.
• Cybernews discloses on its own editorial-policy page that its owner, Mediatech, is backed by Nord Security's founders — the same group behind NordVPN and Surfshark.

None of this automatically makes any given review dishonest — several of these outlets publish real testing and disclose their ownership. But when the referee is on the payroll of one of the teams, you should at least know it. Disclosure quality varies widely, and rankings on affiliated sites consistently feature the owners' products near the top.

For the record: we cite Comparitech's independent speed-test data in our reviews precisely because we don't run fabricated tests — and yes, Comparitech itself is Point-Wild-owned, which is why we name it here and attribute every data point we borrow.

The Independents

Genuinely independent VPNs — no conglomerate parent, no sibling review sites — do still exist:

A caution that cuts the other way: "independent" is not a synonym for "better." Independence tells you about incentives, not about encryption quality, speed, or whether a no-logs policy has ever been audited. Mullvad is independent and excellent; plenty of small independent VPNs are independent and terrible. Weigh ownership as one signal among several — our scorecard shows how we weight the rest.

Five Years of Quiet Consolidation

Why This Matters When You Pick a VPN

Legal exposure. The parent's jurisdiction — not the marketing — determines who can compel data disclosure. A "Panama-based" VPN whose ultimate owner sits in a 14-Eyes country is a more complicated privacy story than the homepage suggests. The 5/9/14 Eyes alliances are intelligence-sharing agreements between the US, UK, and twelve other countries; entities inside them face broader lawful-access obligations.

Incentive structure. A founder-owned VPN answers to its users. A conglomerate brand answers to a portfolio. Neither is automatically good or bad — but when six million Atlas VPN users were migrated to NordVPN overnight, or SaferVPN users woke up as IPVanish customers, that was portfolio logic, not user choice.

Review integrity. If you found this site through a "10 best VPNs" list, it's worth asking who owns that list. Several of the biggest ones are owned by the companies whose products they rank.

Our Own Disclosure — Held to the Same Standard

FrankVPN earns affiliate commissions from Surfshark, NordVPN, PureVPN, and BlancVPN — four brands named on this page. We publish this map anyway, including the facts that complicate our partners' marketing (Nord Security's media affiliation, PureVPN's parent company, BlancVPN's lack of a published audit). Commissions never move a ranking on this site: the methodology and the open scorecard govern every score, and we rank brands we earn nothing from (CyberGhost, IPVanish) exactly where their scores fall. We own no VPN, and no VPN owns us.

What We Could Not Verify

In the spirit of the rest of this page: the things we looked for and could not confirm from a primary source. We publish these as open questions, not facts.

• The exact name of the joint Nord Security / Surfshark holding entity — the merger itself is confirmed by both companies; the holding company's registered name is not something we've verified against a registry filing.
• TorGuard's precise legal entity and owner — self-described as independent; no primary-source confirmation yet.
• The exact date and terms of VyprVPN's sale to Certida LLC — the sale is corroborated; the specifics are single-sourced.
• The current private-equity composition of McAfee's ownership (TunnelBear's ultimate parent) as of mid-2026.

If you have primary documentation on any of these, we'd genuinely like to see it — corrections and additions are credited.

Use This Data

Journalists, bloggers, and researchers are welcome to cite or reproduce this map, in whole or in part, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Suggested attribution:

Source: FrankVPN VPN Ownership & Jurisdiction Map 2026, frankvpn.com.