Technology

What Zoom Is Looking to Add With Its Newest Acquisition

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Zoom Video Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) shares jumped on Thursday after the company announced that it would be making an acquisition to help with its security and encryption. The terms of the deal were not made public.

The company said that it has acquired Keybase, a secure messaging and file-sharing service. The acquisition of these security and encryption engineers will accelerate Zoom’s plan to build end-to-end encryption that can reach current Zoom scalability.

As members of Zoom’s security engineering function, the Keybase team will provide important contributions to Zoom’s 90-day plan to proactively identify, address and enhance the security and privacy capabilities of its platform.

Co-founder and developer of Keybase, Max Krohn, will lead the Zoom security engineering team. Leaders from Zoom and Keybase will work together to determine the future of the Keybase product.

Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom, commented:

There are end-to-end encrypted communications platforms. There are communications platforms with easily deployable security. There are enterprise-scale communications platforms. We believe that no current platform offers all of these. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use, and scale, all at once. The first step is getting the right team together. Keybase brings deep encryption and security expertise to Zoom, and we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his team. Bringing on a cohesive group of security engineers like this significantly advances our 90-day plan to enhance our security efforts.

Zoom Video Communications stock traded up about 7% to $160.57 on Thursday, in a 52-week range of $154.04 to $160.99. The consensus price target is $121.42.

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