Thank you 2025, Hello 2026
It’s been a year of growth at Germ—for our product, our userbase, and our community.
In January, cofounders Tessa and Mark decided to integrate our secure messenger Germ DM with Bluesky’s AT Protocol.
In March, we flew to Seattle to introduce Germ DM to the ATProtocol community and the Bluesky team.
Mark and Tessa arrive in Seattle for ATConf.
In April, Tessa and Anna co-hosted our second Womxn Founders Demo Day with Convex and Women in AI.
In May, we announced our ATProto integration to the public and opened up our waitlist.
In July, we hosted an ATProto meetup at the Internet Archive and demo’d our integration for the first time.
Tessa co-hosts the SF ATProto meetup at the Internet Archive.
Later that month, we brought our first user testers onto the beta, and the integration was covered by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch and Joseph Cox in 404.
In September, Tessa and Mark joined the Cypherpunk Retreat outside Berlin. Our team was awarded a Cypherpunk Fellowship from Protocol Labs for our contributions to distributed group state in Messaging Layer Security, which will be the foundation for group messaging in Germ.
We also hosted a picnic!
Anna debugs in Dolores Park.
In October, Mark presented his co-authored contributions to MLS at IETF in Montreal.
In November, Tessa and Katherine attended Mozilla Festival in Barcelona where Tessa spoke about the private relationships at the center of social networking, today and tomorrow.
Katherine and Tessa at Germ’s Mozilla Fest booth.
In December, Tessa published her two-part “1 year on the AT Protocol” on her new Leaflet blog. She was one of five speakers in the announcement for the second annual AT Protocol community conference, in March 2026 in Vancouver.
Watch out 2026. We’ll see you soon.
Tessa speaks at Mozilla Fest.
