The Psi project was founded in 2001 with a simple goal: to create a friendly, fully-functional IM client for the XMPP network.

Today, Psi is one of the most popular XMPP clients among the millions of users on the XMPP network. With the help of numerous volunteer contributors around the world, Psi's underlying open-source codebase has matured into a stable and feature-rich instant messaging platform.

Various groups have tapped Psi's XMPP messaging technology and sponsored its development along the way, including large companies like Barracuda Networks, RealNetworks, and Portugal Telecom. Psi's foundation is also at the core of many other instant messaging applications, including SAPO Messenger, Jabbin, Barracuda IM, KDE's Kopete, and derived projects like Psi+, Psi Daisy and Psi-psz.

In addition to the core IM technology, other independent projects have also been spun off from the Psi project. Flyspray started its life as Psi's custom bug tracking system, SleekBot is a helpful bot that was developed for our multi-user chat room, and the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) is a robust, cross-platform cryptographic API that provides the security infrastructure for Psi and other applications.

The Psi Team
Although the Psi project has had countless contributors over the years, here are the main folks behind its development:

Justin Karneges (homepage), Project founder (email)
Justin founded Psi and led the project with some pauses (2001-2004,2009-2017). He maintained most of the networking, security, and multimedia parts of the application. Justin resides in California and is half-Greek; he enjoys the beach, baklava and also his new start-up.

Sergey Ilinykh (email)
Sergey (aka Rion) is one of the founders of Psi+ and currently a leader of both Psi and Psi+ projects, He is a low-level Linux and Windows developer with focus on network programming. He's a big fan of the Qt framework in all aspects as well as GUI design. Bicyclist and just a guy who loves life... and Psi =)

Kevin Smith (homepage)
Kev started contributing to the Psi community in 2002, and became the project leader in late 2004, keeping the position until 2009 when he handed back to Justin. Living in England, he also chairs the XSF Council, co-authored XMPP: The Definitive Guide and contributes to assorted other free projects.

Michail Pishchagin
This twenty-something hails from Russia, and specializes in C++ programming. He works mainly with the visible aspects of Psi, and is responsible for nearly all major graphical user interface features of the program since 2003.

Hal Rottenberg
Hal is the webmaster for the Psi project. As such, he's responsible for keeping the content up-to-date and making sure everything stays running. By day, he supports the X-Force security lab at IBM Internet Security Systems. Hal lives in Georgia with his family, and enjoys coaching soccer for his sons.

Remko Tronçon (homepage)
This Belgian spends his days working as a software engineer, playing music, and writing all sorts of code for Psi. He likes to think of himself as the Mac OS guy on the Psi team, and therefore also has a sweet spot for commenting on the look and feel of Psi.

Maciek Niedzielski
Quiet and shy (at least in real life), this student from Poland (although there are unconfirmed rumors that he may be Japanese) likes to watch anime, read manga, and — of course — create new features for Psi.

Martin Hostettler
This student living in Germany works on the Linux-specific parts of Psi. He believes open standards, such as XMPP, are very important and thus likes to improve Psi so that more people can enjoy chatting on the open network. In his free time he likes to read a lot and study the Japanese language.

Khryukin Evgeny (homepage)
IT engineer, living in Ukraine, who enjoys making Psi better. When not coding, he likes reading books, playing guitar, and watching movies.

Boris Pek (homepage)
Tehnick is an active FOSS developer, who likes development of cross-platform software using C++ and Qt and do not afraid of boring tasks such as QA work, maintaining of packages for Debian and Ubuntu, maintaining of builds for MS Windows and macOS, etc..