Squarespace - Political Audit

Corporate Communications & Public Stance

• Squarespace’s press-release archive, SEC disclosures, and current corporate pages reviewed for this audit did not contain a corporate statement addressing Israel, Gaza, Palestinian civilian harm, the ICJ advisory opinion, or ICC warrants.¹²³

• A renewed review specifically targeting the post-19 July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion period and the post-November 2024 ICC arrest-warrant period found no dated Squarespace corporate statement referencing either milestone; no public evidence identified of such a statement.¹³

• Squarespace’s Bright Funds portal publicly lists a “Humanitarian Relief for Victims of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Fund,” stating that donations are distributed among participating nonprofits while not publicly rendering their names.⁴

• In June 2020, Squarespace announced a $500,000 three-year commitment for racial-inequality and justice-reform organizations, employee donation matching through Bright Funds, Black-creator promotion, and expanded inclusion programming.⁵

• Squarespace currently states that it matches eligible employee contributions to nonprofit and social-impact organizations selected by employees, up to $/€600 annually, and describes programming for Black, Jewish, Asian-Pacific, Hispanic/Latinx, LGBTQ+, disability, women’s, and caregiver affinity initiatives.⁶

• Squarespace’s final public annual filing described a commercial platform serving customers in more than 200 countries and territories, with approximately 30% of bookings outside the United States, and framed its mission around internet publishing and commerce rather than region-specific geopolitical activity.²

• A crowdsourced “BDS List” aggregator (masjidalaqsa.com) currently classifies Squarespace as “Boycott Safe,” stating that Squarespace “has no verified evidence of any ties to Israel.” The page cites no sources, documentation, or verification methodology for this conclusion, and per the source-quality standard applied to this audit, the claim is not independently verifiable; it is reported only as a data point that an informal boycott-tracking site does not list Squarespace as a target, and it does not corroborate or add primary evidence to any finding in this audit.⁷

Operations in Occupied or Contested Territories

• Squarespace’s commerce documentation supports Israeli-shekel stores for certain foreign bank-account configurations and states that merchants may ship wherever their carrier operates, without setting out a settlement-specific market or territorial policy.⁸

• Squarespace’s 2023 Form 10-K identified offices in New York, Chicago, Dublin, and Aveiro, plus six international subsidiaries, but did not identify an Israeli or Palestinian subsidiary, office, reseller, data centre, dealership, or employee operation.²

• This corporate-presence finding is limited to Squarespace’s final public annual filing and is not a current private-company subsidiary schedule.²

• Squarespace and the identified Squarespace entities were not found in the supplied document-scoped full-text checks of OHCHR’s 2023 settlement-business database update or its 2025 annexes.⁹¹⁰

• OHCHR’s 2025 review states that it prioritized 215 enterprises and that additional assessments remained incomplete, so the database absence is document-scoped rather than comprehensive.⁹

• Squarespace is not named as a corporate subject in the UN Special Rapporteur’s 2025 report; apparent references are static1.squarespace.com links in footnotes hosting Palestinian Youth Movement reports concerning Maersk.¹¹

• Human Rights Watch’s report links to a Booking.com Cares impact report hosted on Squarespace infrastructure, but the report’s underlying subject is Booking.com rather than Squarespace.¹²

• Al-Haq’s insurance-industry report identifies Squarespace as the web host or publisher for third-party Maersk documents and does not list Squarespace among the insurers or military suppliers it investigates.¹³

• A PDF titled “Oppose the Israel Anti-Boycott Act” (dated 3 January 2018) is hosted at a static1.squarespace.com address, which is Squarespace’s customer-website content-delivery domain, the same hosting pattern already documented elsewhere in this audit for Palestinian Youth Movement/Maersk documents and the Booking.com Cares report. The document’s text could not be extracted to confirm authorship; based on the domain pattern alone, this is very likely a third-party customer’s document hosted on Squarespace’s platform rather than a Squarespace corporate statement, but authorship is not confirmed either way and this lead remains unresolved rather than being treated as evidence of a Squarespace position on anti-boycott legislation.¹⁴

• Permira funds’ former control of Netafim ended with the announced 2017 sale to Mexichem/Orbia, completed in 2018, before Permira acquired Squarespace.¹⁵

• The UN Special Rapporteur’s 2025 report names Netafim and alleges that its irrigation technology facilitated Israeli agricultural expansion and exploitation of land and water in the West Bank, while Who Profits separately identified installations at Masua, Geshur, Dolev, Kalia, Maskiot, Gilgal, Ein Zivan, and Natur.¹¹¹⁶

• Both sources describe Orbia, rather than Permira, as Netafim’s controlling owner from 2018 onward.¹¹¹⁶

• Squarespace was not included in the BDS National Committee’s November 2024 corporate-priority guide.¹⁷

• The masjidalaqsa.com “boycott-safe” classification is consistent with, but adds no independent evidentiary weight to, the finding of no organized boycott campaign targeting Squarespace.⁷

• No public evidence identified of a Squarespace-operated facility, franchise, or commercial presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Golan Heights beyond the merchant self-service commerce tools already described.

Internal Governance, Content & Retail Policies

• No public evidence identified of an Israel–Palestine-specific content moderation carve-out in Squarespace’s published policies.

• Squarespace’s terms state that customers retain ownership of their content, must comply with applicable law, sanctions, and the acceptable-use policy, and remain responsible for their sites, while Squarespace reserves authority to restrict accounts, sites, and content.¹⁸

• The terms do not establish an Israel–Palestine-specific content rule.¹⁸

• Squarespace states that it reviews governmental demands for valid legal process, objects to unlawful demands, and generally notifies affected customers unless notification is legally prohibited.¹⁹

• Squarespace does not publish Israel-specific government-request data in the reviewed materials.¹⁹

• Squarespace’s 2024 DSA transparency report recorded 52 EU illegal-content notices, including 21 actions under company policies and zero actions on the basis of local law.²⁰

• The report recorded zero notices categorized as terrorist content, illegal hate speech, violent or organized crime, or national-security offenses, and did not disaggregate outcomes by Israel–Palestine viewpoint or language.²⁰

• The DSA report states that automated tools are used for suspected fraud and child-sexual-abuse material rather than general political-content classification.²⁰

• During the reporting period, Squarespace reported 28,505 website disablements, 27,934 domain disablements, a stated 4.3% possible error rate, and 2,416 reinstatements through internal complaint handling.²⁰

• As of 26 August 2026, no Squarespace Digital Services Act transparency report covering 2025 activity has been identified; the most recent publicly available report remains the one covering calendar-year 2024, published 28 February 2025. This is an evidence gap rather than a finding that no subsequent report will be published.²⁰

• Targeted searches for a Squarespace employee walkout, petition, or union action specifically concerning Israel-Palestine returned no relevant results; search results surfaced only unrelated general-labor-movement coverage and third-party customer sites hosted on Squarespace infrastructure. No public evidence identified of internal employee organizing on this issue.¹

• Squarespace provides merchant-controlled commerce and donation tools rather than operating a product catalogue, and its terms place responsibility for products, shipping, and legal compliance on merchants.⁸¹⁸

• No public evidence identified of a Squarespace-branded retail product line implicated in occupied-territory sourcing or sale, consistent with Squarespace’s role as a platform provider rather than a merchandiser.⁸¹⁸

Brand Heritage & State Partnerships

• Squarespace traces its origin to Anthony Casalena’s 2003 university dorm-room software project and presents its purpose around design, entrepreneurship, and online business creation.²³

• Squarespace’s public company history and 2023 business filing do not describe a military, intelligence, defence, or state-security origin.²³

• No public evidence identified of a Squarespace state honour, sponsorship, or “Brand Israel”-type partnership with any government.

• Permira established an Israel investment function in 2020, and Ran Maidan is listed as Senior Adviser and Head of Israel, based in Tel Aviv.²¹²²

• Maidan’s official biography records his receipt of the Israeli Industry Award in 2018 while he was Netafim CEO, without describing that award as a Squarespace relationship.²²

• A renewed search this cycle for additional state-partnership, honours, or sponsorship evidence involving Squarespace or Permira found nothing further; no public evidence identified beyond the previously documented Permira Israel office and Maidan biography.²¹²²

Lobbying, Advocacy, Financing & Logistics

• No public evidence identified of Squarespace federal lobbying registrations or FEC filings in the materials reviewed.

• Squarespace’s current policy matches eligible employee donations up to $/€600 annually, while its Bright Funds portal includes the Israeli-Palestinian-conflict fund.⁴⁶

• Publicly reviewed materials do not disclose total Squarespace matching payments, individual recipients, or whether FIDF, JNF, or settlement organizations qualify under that fund.⁴⁶

• Before Permira acquired Squarespace, the Permira Foundation operated an “Israel-Gaza crisis” fund that its 2023 report says supported the International Committee of the Red Cross, Matan for a youth mental-health centre, and a 3:1 crisis-matching programme involving Save the Children, UNICEF, and Magen David Adom.²³

• The 2023 Permira report does not provide recipient-level amounts for those activities.²³

• Permira Foundation’s 2024 Charity Commission filing reported £4.15 million in income and £3.93 million in charitable expenditure, without an indexed reference to Israel, Gaza, Palestine, or Magen David Adom.²⁴

• Whether the 2023 crisis fund continued after 2023 is not established by the available public filing.²⁴

• Permira’s “2025 A Year in Review” page reports €7.5 billion invested and €12.6 billion returned to investors across the firm’s portfolio in 2025, but the retrieved content did not disclose an Israel-specific breakdown, an updated Israel-Gaza charitable fund, or any settlement-linked activity.²⁵

• An OpenSecrets recipient/lobbying profile for Permira Advisers returned an access error on direct fetch, and a companion OpenSecrets organization profile stated, via unverified search-snippet only, that Permira Advisers did not make direct contributions to any candidate in the 2024 election cycle; this claim could not be independently confirmed this cycle and is reported as an unresolved lead rather than an established fact.²⁶²⁷

• In September 2024, Permira Growth Opportunities II completed a majority acquisition of Tel Aviv-based BioCatch at a stated $1.3 billion valuation.²⁸

• Permira describes BioCatch as behavioral-biometric technology for detecting fraud and financial crime, and states that Stefan Dziarski, Dominik Pozny, and Ran Maidan joined its board, with Maidan as chair.²⁸

• Permira’s acquisition announcement identifies banks and online financial businesses as BioCatch’s market and does not disclose an IDF, Ministry of Defense, settlement, military-intelligence, or occupation-related contract.²⁸

• A renewed targeted search for a BioCatch contract or relationship with Israel’s Ministry of Defense or the IDF returned no relevant results, surfacing only unrelated Israeli defense-industry news; no public evidence identified of a BioCatch government or military contract, reaffirming that BioCatch’s disclosed market is banks and online financial businesses.²⁸

• A renewed targeted search for donations by Anthony Casalena, the Casalena Foundation, Permira, Brian Ruder, or Ran Maidan to IDF, FIDF, JNF/KKL, Lev Echad, Regavim, Im Tirtzu, or other settlement- or military-welfare-linked organizations returned no relevant results beyond the organizations’ generic donation pages; no public evidence identified of such a gift from these principals.

• No public evidence identified of Squarespace-operated or Permira-operated logistics, shipping, or freight infrastructure serving Israeli military or settlement supply chains.

Corporate Structure & Primary Mission

• Permira funds completed an approximately $7.2 billion acquisition of Squarespace on 17 October 2024, after which Squarespace became a private, wholly owned subsidiary of the acquisition parent and ceased NYSE trading.²⁹

• Anthony Casalena retained a substantial equity position and continued as Squarespace CEO and board chair following the acquisition.²⁹

• The merger proxy projected that Casalena and affiliates would hold approximately 33.4% of the indirect acquisition parent after closing, General Atlantic approximately 8.5%, and Accel rollover holders approximately 0.5%.³⁰

• A current post-closing capitalization table is not publicly disclosed in the reviewed materials.³⁰²⁹

• Squarespace’s 2023 filing defines its mission as enabling internet publishing, branding, and commerce.²

• The reviewed charter and transaction disclosures identify Delaware incorporation and private commercial shareholders, without disclosing a state-held golden share or a mandate to advance Israeli or any other state’s geopolitical programme.³⁰²

• Permira describes itself as a private investment manager, and its Israel office, Israeli portfolio investment, and former Netafim ownership document commercial investment activity rather than a stated governmental or military mandate.²⁸²¹¹⁵

Executive & Leadership Footprint

• Squarespace’s current leadership page lists Anthony Casalena, Nathan Gooden, Kevin Doerr, John Colton, Angela Crossman, David Lee, Courtenay O’Connor, Raphael Fontes, and Josh Groth among its executive or senior leadership, while acquisition materials confirm Casalena as board chair.²⁹³¹

• A targeted search for any Anthony Casalena personal statement on Israel or Gaza returned no relevant results; unrelated search matches concerned a different individual with a similar name. No public evidence identified of a Casalena personal statement on this issue.

• The Casalena Foundation’s 2024 IRS-derived filing archive reports approximately $220.7 million in assets, identifies Anthony Casalena as unpaid director and president, and discloses a $75,000 grant to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.³²

• Earlier disclosed filings likewise route the foundation’s disclosed grants through the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, and no direct Israel-related grantee appears in the foundation’s named Schedule I grants.³²

• Because the foundation operates through the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, its own returns do not identify every downstream charity selected through affiliated or donor-advised funds and do not establish a complete recipient-level absence.³²

• The foundation’s aggregate financial figures reported in this cycle’s filing summary (approximately $786,887 in revenue and approximately $296,006 in expenses for the reported period) describe annual revenue/expense flow rather than the total-assets figure previously reported, and both are consistent as distinct line items rather than contradictory data points.³²

• Full Form 990-PF Schedule I grant-level detail for the Casalena Foundation beyond the aggregate revenue/expense figures and the single identified $75,000 grant to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation was not retrievable this cycle; a complete downstream grantee list, including any donor-advised-fund pass-through recipients, remains unconfirmed and is an evidence gap rather than a finding of absence.³²

• Brian Ruder is listed as Permira co-managing partner and co-CEO and serves on its executive and buyout investment committees.³³

• No public evidence identified of a public Israel–Palestine statement, donation, or board affiliation by Brian Ruder on this issue.

• Ran Maidan is Permira’s identified Head of Israel, chairs BioCatch following Permira’s majority acquisition, and previously led Netafim.²⁸²²

• No public evidence identified of a public Israel–Palestine statement, donation, or additional board affiliation by Ran Maidan beyond his identified Permira and BioCatch roles.

• Apart from Casalena’s continuing chairmanship and Permira’s general ownership, Squarespace has not published a complete current post-acquisition board roster in the reviewed materials.²⁹³¹