Pornhub is owned by Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm based in Ottawa, Ontario, that acquired the site’s parent company in March 2023. ECP runs the business through an operating subsidiary called Aylo, which was known as MindGeek until August 2023. The ownership chain is short and, for the first time in the platform’s history, openly disclosed: ECP at the top, Aylo as the operating company, and Pornhub sitting inside a portfolio that also includes Brazzers, YouPorn, and Redtube.
Ethical Capital Partners, the Investor at the Top
ECP was founded in 2022 by Rocco Meliambro.1Ethical Capital Partners. Contact The firm announced its acquisition of MindGeek on March 16, 2023, and described itself as “managed by a multidisciplinary team with regulatory, law enforcement, public engagement and finance experience.”2Ethical Capital Partners. ECP Announces Acquisition of MindGeek, Parent Company of Pornhub The other named partners are Fady Mansour, Mike Cosic, Solomon Friedman, and Derek Ogden.
ECP’s public pitch is that it brings institutional governance and legal experience to a company that had operated without much of either. The acquisition also marked the first time the platform’s ownership was announced through a press release rather than uncovered by reporters.
Aylo, the Company That Actually Runs the Site
Aylo is the operating company. It manages Pornhub’s technical infrastructure, content licensing, advertising, and regulatory compliance across the whole portfolio. The name change from MindGeek was announced in August 2023 and framed by the company as a “fresh start” after ECP took over.3Aylo. MindGeek Becomes Aylo
Aylo handles copyright compliance under frameworks like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,4U.S. Copyright Office. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act runs the content moderation programs, and manages relationships with payment processors. Those payment-processor relationships became a survival issue for the platform after 2020, which is where the rest of the ownership story starts.
How Pornhub Ended Up With ECP
The corporate line traces back to Fabian Thylmann, a German entrepreneur who consolidated several high-traffic adult sites under a company called Manwin in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Thylmann was arrested in Belgium and extradited to Germany on suspicion of tax evasion in late 2012.5Federal Election Commission. Federal Election Commission MUR 6678 Manwin USA Inc and Fabian Thylmann In October 2013 he sold his stake to senior executives Feras Antoon and David Tassillo for a reported $100 million. The company was renamed MindGeek the same month.
MindGeek grew into the largest operator in online adult entertainment under Antoon and Tassillo, but it disclosed very little about its ownership, finances, or content practices. That changed in December 2020, when a New York Times investigation described child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual content on the platform. Within days Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing. Pornhub responded by purging content from unverified uploaders, cutting its library from roughly 13 million videos to 4 million. Antoon and Tassillo resigned in 2022. ECP’s acquisition closed in March 2023.
The FTC Settlement the New Owners Inherited
In September 2025, the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah announced a settlement with Aylo. The FTC’s charge was that the company “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual material despite claiming that this content was ‘strictly prohibited.'”6Federal Trade Commission. Pornhub/Mindgeek/Aylo The resolution included a stipulated order for permanent injunction and a monetary judgment.
The conduct at issue predates ECP’s ownership, but the settlement runs against Aylo as it exists today. For the current owners it is both a liability carried over from the MindGeek years and the baseline federal regulators will use to measure future compliance.
The Age Verification Pressure Shaping the Business
The other force acting on Aylo right now is state age verification. In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring adult websites to verify users’ ages, ruling that such laws survive intermediate scrutiny because they “only incidentally burden the protected speech of adults” and that “adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification.”7Supreme Court of the United States. Free Speech Coalition Inc v Paxton
As of late 2025, twenty-five states have age verification requirements for sites hosting material harmful to minors. Rather than comply state by state, Pornhub has blocked access entirely in twenty-three of them, showing a message that directs visitors to contact their legislators. The blocked list includes Texas, Florida, Virginia, Utah, and most of the South and Great Plains. A revised Kids Online Safety Act was introduced in the House in January 2026, and its scope and prospects remain unsettled.
What Disclosed Ownership Actually Changes
The chain today is unusually clean for this industry. ECP is the investor. Aylo is the operator. Both are named, based in Canada, and reachable through public corporate channels. That is a real change from the MindGeek era, when identifying who controlled the company required piecing together filings across jurisdictions.
What it does not change is the legal exposure attached to the platform itself. The FTC settlement, the state age-verification laws, and the payment-processor relationships all run to Aylo, and through Aylo to ECP as owner. Whether disclosed ownership produces different day-to-day operations is the question federal regulators, state attorneys general, and payment processors are testing in real time.