About Compelson

Compelson is an independent Czech software company and the maker of MOBILedit. We created the category of phone content-analysis software in 1996 and have built digital forensic tools ever since, now used by law enforcement, military, and investigators in more than 160 countries.

• Founded: 1991, Prague, Czech Republic

• Ownership: wholly owned by its founder. No investors, no outside capital

• Development: Prague (all dual-use components and all builds) and New Delhi (application and cloud analysis)

• Jurisdiction: European Union and NATO member state

• Compliance: EU dual-use Regulation 2021/821 and the Wassenaar Arrangement

• Pioneers: makers of some of the world’s first SIM and phone forensic tools (from 1996), and the first to fully focus on smartwatch forensics.

Provenance & Trust

In digital forensics, the tool that touches the evidence must itself be beyond suspicion. You should know exactly who owns it, who writes it, and who can reach it. We call our answer Purity: nothing hidden, no outside owners, and no part of our software beyond our own control.

Purity of ownership. Compelson is owned outright by its founder, who has also led it as CEO since it began in 1991. There are no investors, no private equity, no state funding, and no outside money of any kind, and for more than thirty years the company has run entirely on its own profits. The same person has owned and run it throughout: no hidden hand behind our decisions, and no outside party with a claim on our company, our roadmap, or your data.

Purity of development. All dual-use components are developed in Prague, and every build is run in Prague, on build servers inside our own office and administered solely by our staff. All work is done on-site in our own well-secured offices, in Prague and in New Delhi; home-office and remote development are not permitted anywhere in the company. Every engineer who has developed MOBILedit in Prague has been a citizen of the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Access to our dual-use code is deliberately compartmentalized and held only in Prague, and most of our engineers, in Prague and New Delhi alike, build the product without ever touching it: a security principle applied across the whole company, not a hierarchy. Our New Delhi office, opened in October 2023, develops application and cloud analysis and is staffed entirely by Indian nationals, including senior specialists with experience at leading technology companies in fields such as TPM and hardware security. Every contribution is reviewed in Prague before it enters the product, and we build there for expertise, not for low cost. Every person who contributes to MOBILedit is known, on-site, and accountable, with no anonymous, remote, or undisclosed development anywhere in our supply chain.

Purity of data. MOBILedit Forensic contains no telemetry and is built to run fully air-gapped. Your case data stays inside your environment and never reaches ours.

Where we stand. Our commitment to democratic values and our opposition to the Russian government’s war have placed us firmly on one side. On 9 January 2025, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation declared Compelson an “undesirable organization,” the same designation Russia has applied to institutions such as the RAND Corporation, the Royal United Services Institute, and Yale and Stanford universities. Compelson is the only specialist digital forensics company on that list.

We welcome due diligence and will document any of the above on request.

Our mission

Digital evidence decides cases, so it must come from tools you can trust. Our mission is to give investigators forensic tools that stand up to scrutiny: to help convict the guilty, exonerate the innocent, and ensure justice rests on evidence that holds. We put the same power in ordinary people’s hands, so anyone can see what their own devices reveal about them and test how secure their apps really are. Our flagship, MOBILedit Forensic, helps professionals collect and analyse mobile data to uncover the evidence a case turns on. How we build that tool matters as much as what it does, which is why our independence and provenance are promises we put in writing, above.

Our story

Compelson began in Prague in 1991, at the dawn of the PC security era, with antivirus and security software; our early products included Data Officer and Security Officer. One of our first developers went on to lead Avast, the Czech antivirus company now used by hundreds of millions. We were part of a remarkable moment: the Czech and Slovak antivirus tradition that gave the world Avast and AVG in the Czech lands and ESET in Slovakia, and made this small region one of the planet’s defensive-security heartlands.

In 1996 we turned that security expertise to a new problem, reading and analysing the contents of mobile phones, and helped create the phone-forensics industry. In 2019 we did it again, becoming the first to build forensic tools for smartwatches. Thirty years on, the same instincts drive us: deep technical craft, independence, and tools built to be trusted.