The story
Rocket.Chat was created in 2015 by Gabriel Engel and collaborators in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The project began as part of work on a customer relationship management (CRM) system when the developers needed a live chat component. According to Gabriel Engel, the team, originally working at the Brazilian business software company Konecty, had explored integrating Slack but found it too limited for their needs and decided to build their own chat platform using JavaScript. A prototype was published on GitHub, after which the project attracted community interest and further development.
The company was subsequently incorporated in Delaware while maintaining engineering operations in Brazil. Rocket.Chat has since maintained and expanded the project, securing external investment to support its growth. According to company statements, Rocket.Chat is in use internationally and has been adopted by a range of organizations, including enterprises and government agencies.
In 2024, Rocket.Chat's end-to-end encryption (E2EE) was independently analyzed by two research groups. One study was conducted by a research team based at The University of Osaka and was presented at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), an academic conference. Separately, an independent security analysis was conducted by a master's student at ETH Zurich as part of a master's thesis. Both studies reported multiple vulnerabilities affecting the confidentiality and integrity guarantees of Rocket.Chat's E2EE, and subsequent releases addressed several of the reported issues.
From Wikipedia’s article on Rocket.Chat, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6