Rainberry Inc., the maker of μtorrent and BitTorrent software and a pioneering San Francisco company in decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing technology, is shuttering its Financial District headquarters office and laying off 92 employees, becoming the latest big name tech company to trim its downtown footprint.
The company may be relocating from San Francisco altogether. A representative of the company told me on Friday that Kearny Street was the only Rainberry office space but it will continue to maintain its mailing address, which corresponds to a post office mail box in West Portal. Founded in 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, the company developed a protocol that enables the quick sharing of large files with minimal bandwidth, allowing the power of several home computers to replace the need for a large single-source server. At its peak in the early 2010s, BitTorrent had as many as a quarter billion active monthly users and the protocol accounted for virtually half of file-sharing bandwidth on the Internet.