Who owns MindGeek? Ownership structure explained (2026)

MindGeek was, for more than a decade, the corporate parent of the world's largest adult-content network, including Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, and a set of paid studios such as Brazzers. The company built its scale on a tube-site model that mirrored the free, user-upload structure of mainstream video platforms, then layered paid subscriptions and advertising on top. That model made it one of the most-visited web properties in the world and, later, the target of sustained legal and regulatory pressure.

The ownership question is unusually tangled for a company of its size. MindGeek operated through a web of subsidiaries registered in Luxembourg, Cyprus, and other low-tax jurisdictions while running day-to-day operations from Montreal. Its controlling shareholder stayed almost entirely out of public view for years. In 2023, the entire business changed hands and changed its name, which is why searches for "who owns MindGeek" now resolve to a different company and a different owner.

Understanding who owns the company matters because ownership sits at the center of every controversy attached to it. Questions about how the platform verifies content, how it responds to allegations of non-consensual material, and how it navigates a wave of age-verification laws all trace back to who controls the company and what obligations that owner has accepted.

The business now called Aylo traces its roots to Montreal. Its earliest corporate ancestor, Mansef, was incorporated in Quebec in 2004 by Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef. Pornhub itself launched in May 2007, developed by Matt Keezer and a group of associates that included Feras Antoon. The tube site grew quickly by hosting free, user-uploaded video.

Around 2010 and 2011, German technology investor Fabian Thylmann acquired the Manos and Youssef operation and Pornhub, folding them and a series of other adult sites into a holding company called Manwin. Thylmann's consolidation created a single owner for many of the largest free tube sites and several paid production studios. In 2013, Thylmann sold his stake to two executives who had been running operations from Montreal, and the company was renamed MindGeek that same year. The reported price for that transaction was about $100 million.

MindGeek is headquartered in Montreal, where the bulk of its workforce sits, but its legal structure spans multiple jurisdictions. The parent entity, MindGeek S.à r.l., was incorporated in Luxembourg, with operating subsidiaries such as MG Freesites Ltd. registered in Cyprus and other entities in Canada and additional offshore locations. That structure has been widely described as a tax-efficient arrangement for what is, in practice, a Montreal-run company.

The company is privately held and publishes no audited financials. Independent revenue and valuation figures cited by data aggregators are unverified and should be treated with caution. What is confirmed is that the business was sold in 2023, and that court filings surfaced in 2025 reported a purchase price of roughly $400 million, a private figure of the kind a business valuation calculator helps approximate in the absence of a public share price.

The company has never been publicly listed. Its shares do not trade on any exchange, and no IPO has been announced. It has been controlled throughout its history by private owners, first by a founder-technologist, then by executives and a hidden majority shareholder, and since 2023 by a private-equity firm. In August 2023, the company retired the MindGeek name and rebranded as Aylo. The legal entities and the operating business are the same; only the corporate name and the owner changed.

In March 2023, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a private-equity firm founded in 2022 and based in Ottawa, Canada, announced it had acquired MindGeek. ECP became the company's controlling owner, and five months later it rebranded the business as Aylo.

ECP presented the acquisition as a compliance-led turnaround rather than a conventional financial buyout. Its founding partners come from legal, regulatory, and law-enforcement backgrounds. Solomon Friedman, a criminal-defense lawyer and ordained rabbi, serves as a partner and the group's vice president of compliance, and he has acted as the primary public spokesperson on content-safety reforms, engaging with legislators, regulators, and the press. Other named partners include Derek Ogden, a retired chief superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Sarah Bain, who leads public engagement. ECP has not published a full list of its own limited partners or the sources of the capital it used for the acquisition.

Ownership of the company changed several times before ECP. Because MindGeek was private throughout, deal terms were rarely disclosed in full, and several of the figures below come from reporting rather than confirmed filings.

Note: The company has not confirmed the price of either the 2013 buyout or the 2023 sale to ECP. The $100 million and $400 million figures come from reporting and litigation documents, not from the company.

For most of the MindGeek era, the visible leadership was Antoon as CEO and Tassillo as chief operating officer. Reporting later identified Bernd Bergmair, an Austrian financier and former Goldman Sachs banker, as the company's largest shareholder. Bergmair kept an extremely low public profile and rarely appeared in company communications, which meant the person with the largest economic stake in one of the web's most-visited platforms was, for years, almost unknown. His stake was among the holdings sold in the 2023 transaction.

As the controlling owner, ECP holds the decisive position in Aylo's strategy and governance. The firm has framed its role around compliance and content moderation, and Solomon Friedman is the partner most associated with that mandate publicly. Governance now sits with ECP as owner rather than with the founder-executives who previously ran the company.

The founder-executives who defined the MindGeek era, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, resigned from their operating roles in mid-2022, before the ECP sale closed. The company installed new senior management, and Aylo's day-to-day operations are led by an executive team based primarily in Montreal. Aylo has not published a detailed board roster, so specific board composition under ECP ownership is not fully disclosed.

What is confirmed is that ECP owns and controls the company, that Antoon and Tassillo left operating roles in 2022, and that Bergmair was reported as the prior majority owner. Precise equity percentages, the identities of ECP's own investors, and the full board are not public, so any statement about exact ownership splits is inferred rather than confirmed.

In December 2020, The New York Times published "The Children of Pornhub," a column by Nicholas Kristof alleging that the platform hosted videos depicting the sexual abuse of minors and non-consensual content. The company called the allegations untrue, but the fallout was immediate. Mastercard said its investigation confirmed violations of its standards and instructed connected financial institutions to stop accepting its cards on the site, and Visa suspended acceptance pending its own review. Losing access to the two dominant card networks cut off a core payment channel. In response, the company barred uploads from unverified users and removed all content that unverified accounts had posted, a purge that eliminated a large share of the site's video library. The role of the card networks in the business became a recurring theme in later litigation, and both Visa and Mastercard were named in subsequent complaints.

The company has faced a series of lawsuits alleging it profited from non-consensual and child sexual abuse material. Plaintiffs, including Serena Fleites, whose case became widely known, argued that the company and its financial partners benefited from videos posted without consent. In 2023, Aylo reached a settlement with US federal prosecutors in connection with content produced by GirlsDoPorn, whose operators were charged with sex trafficking, and the company acknowledged that it had profited from that content. Separately, a group of trafficking survivors settled civil claims against the company, and reporting has described settlement figures reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars across the various actions. Litigation over historical content has continued into 2025, with the company contesting individual claims while resolving others. The volume and nature of these cases make legal exposure a central feature of the company's risk profile, of the kind organizations track in a risk register.

A wave of US state laws now requires adult sites to verify that visitors are adults, typically through government ID or age-estimation technology. Aylo has opposed these laws, arguing they burden adults' privacy and free-speech rights and push users toward non-compliant sites, and it has blocked access to Pornhub in many states rather than deploy the required checks. In June 2025, the US Supreme Court upheld Texas's age-verification law in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in a 6-3 decision, a ruling that cleared the way for similar laws in other states. The company has also withdrawn from markets abroad, including France, over comparable requirements. Age-verification compliance is now one of the defining operational and legal challenges for the business under ECP ownership.

Ownership matters here more than for most companies because the entire public case for the business, as ECP presents it, rests on who controls it and what that owner has committed to. ECP acquired the company in the middle of an acute crisis over content safety, payment access, and litigation, and it framed the purchase around compliance rather than growth. Whether those commitments hold depends on a private-equity firm whose own investors are not publicly identified, which limits outside visibility into the incentives behind the reforms.

The shift from the prior owners also reshaped accountability. Under the MindGeek structure, a hidden majority shareholder and a small group of executives controlled a platform with global reach while attracting little public scrutiny of the ownership itself. ECP's approach, at least in its public posture, has been the opposite, with a named partner acting as the face of compliance. That change in transparency is itself a consequence of the ownership transfer.

Ownership also determines how the company navigates the legal and regulatory pressure that now defines its operating environment. Payment-network relationships, trafficking litigation, and state age-verification laws each demand decisions that only the controlling owner can make, from how aggressively to contest lawsuits to whether to exit entire markets. The company's response to the Texas ruling and its market withdrawals reflect choices made under ECP control, not by the founders who built the business.

Finally, the private structure limits what anyone outside the company can verify. Because the business publishes no audited financials and has never been listed, figures on revenue, profitability, and even the acquisition price come from reporting and litigation rather than disclosure. That opacity is a direct product of the ownership model, and it shapes how much of the company's economics can be known at all. The same dynamic distinguishes it from creator-economy platforms with clearer disclosure, such as OnlyFans and Patreon, which occupy adjacent parts of the online-content market.

MindGeek is owned by Ethical Capital Partners, a private-equity firm based in Ottawa, Canada, which acquired the company in March 2023. In August 2023, ECP rebranded the business as Aylo, so the company that was MindGeek now operates under the Aylo name.

No. The company has never been publicly listed, and its shares do not trade on any exchange. It has been privately held throughout its history, first by individual owners and executives, and since 2023 by Ethical Capital Partners.

Pornhub launched in Montreal in 2007, developed by Matt Keezer and associates including Feras Antoon, with corporate roots in Mansef, founded by Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef in 2004. The MindGeek name dates to 2013, when executives Feras Antoon and David Tassillo took control after buying out Fabian Thylmann, who had consolidated the sites under Manwin.

Since March 2023, the controlling owner has been Ethical Capital Partners. Before that, Bernd Bergmair, an Austrian financier, was reported as the majority owner, with executives Feras Antoon and David Tassillo holding stakes and running operations until they resigned in 2022. Exact ownership percentages have never been publicly disclosed.

ECP has not disclosed the terms of the acquisition. Court filings surfaced in 2025 reported a purchase price of roughly $400 million, but that figure comes from litigation documents rather than the company, and it should be treated as reported rather than confirmed.

The company rebranded to Aylo in August 2023, five months after the ECP acquisition, presenting the change as a fresh start after years of controversy attached to the MindGeek name. The legal entities and operations did not change; only the corporate name and the owner did.