Proton doesn’t strike me as a run of the mill local business. They are a big name, they have millions of customers and a lot of them on their business plan and they have to maintain big and complicated infrastructure and pay their IT employees that demand a lot. They seem sustainable.
If they’re not VC funded it doesn’t mean that they’re struggling to make ends meet and can’t allow spare cash. And Standard Notes is not another AI startup with inflated value only fit for the megacorp aquisition.