NordVPN and Surfshark Are the Same Company Since 2022

If you are choosing between NordVPN and Surfshark, you are almost certainly treating them as rivals. Nearly every "best VPN" list does. They sit next to each other as the two finalists, scored on price and speed and features, as though a win for one is a loss for the other. A VPN, short for virtual private network, is the tool that routes your traffic through a provider's server to hide your real address, and these two are among the biggest consumer names in that market.

Here is the part the comparison pages leave out. Since February 2, 2022, NordVPN and Surfshark have belonged to the same company. They merged that day under a single holding company registered in the Netherlands, and they have marketed themselves as competitors ever since.

We run a proxy network, not a VPN, so these are not our products and we have no side to sell you between them. What we do is track who owns every brand in the proxy and VPN world, because ownership is a real, checkable fact that changes how you should read a comparison. This is the sourced version of the NordVPN and Surfshark story: the merger, the paperwork, the honest nuance both companies are right to stress, and the one lesson that actually costs you money if you miss it.

The merger, in plain terms

On February 2, 2022, Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN, and Surfshark announced they had signed a merger agreement. Both published it the same day, NordVPN's announcement and Surfshark's announcement, and the news went out over PR Newswire as well.

The merger did not fold one brand into the other. It created a parent above both: a holding company registered in the Netherlands under the name Cyberspace. A holding company is a business whose job is to own other businesses rather than to sell anything itself. Its formal entity record lists it as Cyberspace B.V., at Fred. Roeskestraat 115 in Amsterdam, carrying the Legal Entity Identifier (a standardised global ID for companies, abbreviated LEI) 984500E90FB636CCD380 (Bloomberg LEI record; VPNOverview).

So the structure is simple to state: one Dutch parent, two consumer VPN brands underneath it. NordVPN keeps its own long-standing setup (its app is operated through a Panama entity, NordVPN S.A., formerly named Tefincom, under Nord Security in Amsterdam), and Surfshark keeps its own (founded in 2018, first registered in the British Virgin Islands, headquarters moved to the Netherlands in 2021) (Wikipedia: NordVPN; Wikipedia: Surfshark B.V.). Same owner, two sets of books, two brands on the shelf.

The timeline nobody puts on the comparison pages

The merger did not come out of nowhere. It was the last step in a decade of the same small circle of people building, buying, and combining VPN brands out of one city, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN, was founded in 2012 and incubated by a Lithuanian venture builder called Tesonet (more on Tesonet below). Surfshark arrived in 2018, registered at first in the British Virgin Islands. In October 2021 two things happened close together: Surfshark moved its headquarters to the Netherlands, and Nord Security acquired a third VPN brand, Atlas VPN. Then, in January 2022, Surfshark's CEO admitted for the first time that Surfshark had been developed inside Tesonet, the same house as NordVPN. Shortly after, the merger was signed.

The end of that story is the tell. In April 2024, Atlas VPN was shut down and its roughly 6 million users were moved to NordVPN (PCWorld). Acquire a competitor, merge with another, retire the one you bought: that is a consolidation playbook, not a competition.

The one hollow marker is the date Surfshark finally talked about itself. The solid markers are the dates on the paperwork. The gap between the two is the whole point.

The Tesonet thread

This is where it stops looking like a coincidence.

Tesonet is a venture builder founded in Vilnius in 2008 by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas. A venture builder is a kind of startup studio: it launches, funds, and staffs new companies rather than simply buying finished ones. Nord Security, the maker of NordVPN, was co-founded by those same two people and incubated by Tesonet. Oxylabs, one of the largest proxy companies in the world, was founded in 2015 as a Tesonet company. And Surfshark, it turns out, grew up in the same building.

For years that last link was not public. Then in January 2022, Surfshark's CEO Vytautas Kaziukonis told TechRadar that Surfshark "was developed alongside Nord Security and NordVPN, under the umbrella company and business incubator Tesonet," and that Surfshark had been part of the Tesonet group for the first two years of its life. TechRadar noted the tie had been "initially not widely known" and "had never been admitted to before." The admission landed just before the merger.

There is a second thread worth pulling. Before running Surfshark, Kaziukonis is reported to have served as Director of Product at Oxylabs in 2019, where he led its web-intelligence product (Philomaths). The same person sat near the center of the VPN side and the proxy side of this cluster. In 2026 he moved again, to a bank inside the same portfolio (MarketScreener). These are not strangers who happened to merge. They are one network of companies and the people who run them, which is exactly why a NordVPN-versus-Surfshark "rivalry" was never quite what it looked like. We mapped the wider version of this, including the proxy brands, in who owns your proxy provider.

One honest caveat on the legal wiring. Tesonet is a venture builder, and the merged VPN group sits under Cyberspace B.V., a separate Dutch holding company. The public record does not show a single top company that legally owns all of it in one clean chain. The thread that ties these brands together is shared founders and shared incubation, plus the 2022 merger, not one proven master holding company. That distinction matters, and flattening it into "one company secretly owns everything" is how a true story gets waved away.

What an "independent VPN comparison" is really worth

Type "NordVPN vs Surfshark" into a search engine and you will get thousands of pages promising an independent verdict. Hold that word, independent, up against what you now know. When the two brands being compared share a corporate parent, the contest has a strange property: whichever one "wins," the same company keeps your subscription. There is no outcome where the group loses.

That does not make every comparison dishonest. Plenty of reviewers genuinely test both and report real differences in speed, apps, and price, and those differences are real. But it does mean two things are quietly true of a large amount of "best VPN" content:

• The shootout you are reading may be a house comparing its own two products, refereed as though they were enemies. A lot of that content is also monetised through affiliate commissions that pay out no matter which of the two you pick.
• "We recommend Surfshark as the budget pick and NordVPN as the premium pick" is not two independent recommendations. It is one owner selling you a good-better ladder, the same way a single consumer-goods company sells three brands of detergent on one shelf.

We write comparisons too, including honest head-to-heads against the big proxy names, and the thing that makes them worth reading is not that we are unbiased (we sell a competing product and we say so). It is that we are on the outside of the group we are describing. Knowing who is inside a group and who is outside it is the first thing to establish, before you trust any ranking.

The honest nuance: one owner, two networks

It would be easy to overstate this, so here is the careful version. One owner does not mean one product. Both NordVPN and Surfshark say they continue to operate autonomously, on separate infrastructures, with separate apps, separate audits, and separate product teams (Cybernews). When the merger was announced, both companies were explicit that they would keep running independently rather than collapse into a single service.

That matters for what you can and cannot claim. You cannot say your NordVPN traffic secretly runs over Surfshark's servers, or the reverse. As far as the public record shows, they are two working networks that happen to share an owner. If you specifically prefer one app, one jurisdiction story, or one feature set, that preference is still real, and the merger does not erase it.

What the shared ownership changes is not the technology. It is the meaning of "choice" when you line the two up against each other, and it is the value of buying both as insurance.

The buyer lesson: two brands are not two baskets

Some people run two VPNs on purpose. They keep one as the main service and a second as a backup, so that if the first is blocked, breached, or has a bad outage, the other carries them. It is the same instinct serious data teams have when they split traffic across two proxy providers so a single failure cannot take everything down. It is a good instinct. Splitting it across NordVPN and Surfshark is just not a real way to act on it.

Redundancy only works when the two things can fail independently. NordVPN and Surfshark share a parent, which means they also share the things that flow down from a parent: pricing strategy, corporate policy, legal jurisdiction, investor pressure, and exposure to any problem at the group level. A decision made once in Amsterdam can move both brands at the same time. That is the definition of correlated risk, and correlated risk is exactly what redundancy is supposed to remove.

None of this is a reason to avoid either product. It is a reason to know what you actually bought. If you want a genuine second supplier, for a VPN or for proxies, the test is not "different brand." It is "different owner."

Where HProxy fits, and where it does not

HProxy is a proxy company, not a VPN, so we are not going to pretend we are the answer to "NordVPN or Surfshark." A VPN and a proxy solve different problems: a consumer VPN encrypts and reroutes all of your device's traffic for privacy, while a proxy routes specific requests through a chosen IP for tasks like scraping, testing, and automation. If you want a VPN, buy the VPN that fits you, just buy it knowing who owns it.

What carries over is the principle this whole piece is built on. Ownership is a fact you can check, and it should be easy for a provider to answer plainly. HProxy is independent: we are not part of a larger proxy or VPN group, we do not own the other names on your shortlist, and none of them own us. That is the same bet we make everywhere, that being able to say plainly who we are is worth more than a marketing story. Our proxies are $0.65/GB pay as you go, with no KYC (the know-your-customer identity checks many providers force on you) and a balance that does not expire, and you can inspect the network first with the free proxy checker and the live free proxy list before you trust any of it.

If you came here to compare two VPNs, the takeaway is smaller and more useful than a winner: you were comparing two brands with one owner. Read the next "independent" comparison with that in mind, and check the ownership before you check the star rating. We keep the wider map current in who owns your proxy provider, and we take apart what happens when nobody checks the sourcing in the NetNut botnet takedown and Shifter was Microleaves.

Sources

• NordVPN, Nord Security and Surfshark sign a merger agreement (merger announced February 2, 2022)
• Surfshark, Surfshark merges with Nord Security (same-day merger announcement; brands to operate autonomously)
• PR Newswire, Nord Security and Surfshark join forces (merger announcement)
• Bloomberg LEI, CYBERSPACE B.V. (Dutch holding entity, LEI 984500E90FB636CCD380, Fred. Roeskestraat 115, Amsterdam)
• VPNOverview, Landmark merger between Nord Security and Surfshark is finalized (holding company registered in the Netherlands as Cyberspace)
• Cybernews, Nord Security and Surfshark merge to create the largest security powerhouse (separate infrastructures, roadmaps, and user bases kept after the merger)
• TechRadar, Surfshark founder reveals ties to NordVPN and Tesonet (January 2022 admission; tie "had never been admitted to before")
• Wikipedia, NordVPN (Nord Security founded 2012; NordVPN S.A. Panama, formerly Tefincom; Nord Security incorporated in Amsterdam)
• Wikipedia, Surfshark B.V. (founded 2018, first registered in the British Virgin Islands, HQ moved to the Netherlands in 2021)
• PCWorld, Atlas VPN is shutting down (Atlas VPN acquired by Nord Security in 2021, shut down April 24, 2024, about 6 million users moved to NordVPN)
• Philomaths, Monday stand-up (Vytautas Kaziukonis as Director of Product at Oxylabs, 2019)
• MarketScreener, Artea Bank Group appoints Vytautas Kaziukonis (2026 move to a portfolio bank)
• Wikipedia, Tesonet (venture builder founded 2008 in Vilnius by Okmanas and Sabaliauskas)