Hotspot Shield launched in 2008 from AnchorFree, founded in 2005 by David Gorodyansky and Eugene Malobrodsky in Redwood City, California. The company later became Pango and is now Point Wild, which also owns Betternet, Touch VPN, UltraVPN and the review site Comparitech. Hotspot Shield keeps a free tier, but its privacy policy has drawn repeated criticism and it has not published an independent audit.
