Festivals
Tens of thousands of phones, one overwhelmed cell site. Nearby uses the crowd itself: a message can hop phone to phone across the grounds.
Investments
When the towers don’t.
A private messenger with a Bluetooth mesh for festivals, parks, and emergencies. We never read your conversations — not on the internet, and not over Nearby.
Privacy
We never read conversations.
Messages are locked on the device before they go anywhere. Pigeon does not have a spare key. Our servers carry sealed envelopes. Phones that help relay a Nearby message only forward opaque bytes. We cannot open a chat, and we do not want to.
The wedge
Nearby is the difference
Most messengers assume a good cell connection. At a packed festival the towers give up. In a park you’re in a dead zone. In an emergency the network is often the first thing to go. Nearby is a Bluetooth mesh so the same locked messages can still move between phones that are close — and hop through a crowd of people who also have it on.
Parks and trails
Places data never really worked. If you’re close — a picnic, a trailhead, a campsite — Bluetooth still can. You turn it on when you want it.
Emergencies
When cell and Wi-Fi are down, people nearby can still reach each other. This is not a replacement for 911. It’s a way to keep talking when the usual path is gone.
How it works
Encrypt once. Deliver either way.
Lock the message on the device, then send it over the internet — or over Bluetooth when that isn’t there. Each hop is about as far as a large room. In a dense crowd, other Pigeon users can pass it along. Relays never see the text. It will not find someone across town, and we don’t advertise it as a city-wide network.
One-to-one chats use the Signal Protocol. We didn’t invent a new cipher. The interesting work is the mesh: a real messenger with a second path that doesn’t weaken the first.
Why this is a company
A path the others don’t have
WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage need the internet. Offline mesh apps rarely feel like a messenger you’d give your family. Pigeon is both: private chat you can live in, plus Bluetooth when the towers fail.
One app, four places
Windows is live. iPhone, Android, and Mac are next — the same product, not a companion leftover. Nearby is built for phones in a crowd. That’s the point of shipping them well.
A business that isn’t the inbox
No ads. No public feed. No selling conversations. People who live in Pigeon can pay for more room. Privacy and Nearby are the product, not the upgrade.
Business
How we make money
Private messaging stays free. Pigeon Plus is for people who actually live here — more linked devices, bigger groups, larger files, extra sealed backups, longer retention. Capacity, not confidentiality.
We will not run ads against the inbox, put encryption on a timer, or charge to keep Nearby. If those are the levers, we built the wrong company.
Now
Where we are
Closed beta. The Windows app is on kastia.net. Phones and Mac are next — Nearby is a phone-in-a-crowd problem, so those surfaces matter. Groups, files, and the mesh already exist. The product will change.
Kastia is a small company. Engineering is most of the work. A serious next step is shipping phones well, hardening the Bluetooth mesh in the field, and paying for an independent security review.
If you’re considering this
Write [email protected]. Put investing in the subject. Say who you are and why Pigeon is interesting — a few sentences is enough. We read it.
This is not a round announcement, and it isn’t a data room. If it’s a fit, we’ll send what you actually need. For how the lock and the mesh work, start with How it works and the privacy policy.