Kolab Now is operated by Apheleia IT AG, a Swiss software-freedom company headquartered in Bern. The legal entity was originally founded as Kolab Systems in Zürich in 2010 and was later renamed Apheleia IT AG. The Kolab Now consumer/SMB SaaS launched as a public beta in January 2013 and became a paid generally-available service on 1 August 2013. The product is a managed hosting of the fully open-source Kolab groupware platform that the same company develops and maintains, covering email, calendars, contacts, tasks, files, and notes via standard open protocols (IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV) so that any standard mail/calendar client can connect.
The governance and pedigree are unusually strong for the privacy-email category. The Apheleia IT AG board includes Georg Greve (CEO; founding president of the Free Software Foundation Europe), CTO Jeroen van Meeuwen, Michael Moser (CCO; co-founder of Adfinis, Switzerland's leading open-source integrator), and Philipp Koch (co-founder of Swiss hosting company Nine.ch). That combination (a free-software figurehead plus a Swiss open-source integrator plus a Swiss hosting operator on the same board) is uncommon and translates into a structurally transparent posture: the product is open-source software run by people whose careers are documented free-software / open-infrastructure work.
For an EU-sovereignty audit Kolab Now is a clean Swiss pick. The legal entity is Swiss-incorporated, the data is hosted in Switzerland, Switzerland holds an EU adequacy decision under Art. 45 GDPR (so EU↔CH transfers need no SCCs), and there is no US parent and no US-VC participation. The only documentation gaps are: no public DPA or sub-processors URLs and no formal ISO 27001 attestation were surfaced at audit, a documentation gap rather than a structural concern.
Pricing in CHF (per the public site / blog): the standard groupware individual account is CHF 8.99/month, the email-only individual account is CHF 4.55/month, and the on-site (self-host) Apheleia "Kolab on-site Email & Groupware" subscription starts at CHF 2.25 per user/month for fewer than 50 users. EUR equivalents recorded approximately. Best fit: privacy-conscious EU users who want Swiss-jurisdiction email/groupware on top of a transparent, fully-open-source software stack, and any procurement-grade buyer who specifically values FSF-Europe / Adfinis / Nine.ch governance over a brand-name marketing pitch.