- Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, takes the 27th Liberal Award
- JFZH cites his record on privacy, start-ups, and tech sovereignty
- The November 12 ceremony coincides with Switzerland’s second surveillance consultation
Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, has won the 2026 Liberal Award.
The prize is handed out each year by the Jungfreisinnige Kanton Zürich (JFZH), the Young Liberals of the Canton of Zurich, to someone judged to have made a significant contribution to a liberal society.
His company is best known for its privacy suite: Proton Mail, Proton VPN – one of the best VPN services on the market – along with Proton Drive and Proton Pass. The JFZH credits Yen with building a European alternative to the major US tech platforms, and with making the case for privacy at a time when Swiss surveillance rules are back in play.
From CERN to a 100-million-user company
Yen’s route into tech ran through physics. He holds a PhD in particle physics from Harvard and worked as a research scientist at CERN in Geneva before turning to building Proton, which is headquartered in the same city.
The company now employs more than 700 people, 60 of them in the Canton of Zurich, and says it serves over 100 million customers worldwide. It’s majority-owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation – a structure Proton presents as a safeguard against the pressures that typically come with venture capital.
“Andy Yen stands up for what matters to us as well: the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence instead of blanket suspicion,” said Mikhail Shalaev, president of the JFZH. “He champions better conditions so that start-ups can grow from Switzerland. And Proton is building in Europe the key technologies that will allow our continent to remain self-determined in the future.”
An award tied to a surveillance debate
The JFZH is explicit about the timing. Switzerland’s Federal Council plans to revise the Ordinance on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF), a move critics warn could introduce indiscriminate mass surveillance through mandatory data retention.
The revised ordinance was overwhelmingly rejected in the first public consultation. The Federal Council has since commissioned a regulatory impact assessment and scheduled a second consultation for November 2026.
“The Federal Council must protect privacy instead of risking an exodus of our most innovative tech companies,” Shalaev added.
What happens next
Yen joins past recipients including media entrepreneur Roger Schawinski, former federal councillors Pascal Couchepin, Kaspar Villiger, and Guy Parmelin, the Swiss Institute for Economic Policy (IWP), and Argentina’s deregulation minister Federico Sturzenegger.
The ceremony takes place on Thursday, November 12 2026 at Westhive in Zurich.
For Proton, the timing matters as much as the recognition. The company has spent years arguing that Europe needs its own privacy infrastructure rather than relying on US providers – a case the JFZH is making, and one that lands harder while the Federal Council debates data retention.