Effortlessly extraordinary networking
NetFoundry’s vision to cover the planet with secure-by-design networking required reinventing the enterprise networking model itself.
Mission #1 accomplished. NetFoundry now delivers billions of sessions per year, helping to secure and simplify challenging environments such as critical infrastructure and 2 of the largest 5 companies in the world.
Today, NetFoundry announced a key milestone in the journey for mission #2: our Series A venture round which will help the rest of the world replace insecure, complex networking with secure-by-design, effortlessly extraordinary networking.
Series A preferred venture round
We are thrilled to announce that SYN Ventures is anchoring our Series A venture round of over $12 million. The SYN team has managed or invested in cybersecurity leaders including Adlumin, Carbon Black, Cylance, Demisto, Halycon, Mandiant, RSA Security and Talon.
SYN’s expertise and experience are great, but what immediately jumped out was the SYN people. These are the people we want in the trenches with us. Our strategic investors also continued to invest in NetFoundry this year, adding to over $50 million of prior investment (and they are now 10% shareholders), while other investors will be revealed later.
The goal of previous investment was to build the world’s first platform and products for secure-by-design networking, and to serve early adopters with excellence. The goal of the Series A is to help secure the rest of the world, so this marks a key milestone on that journey.
Where we are – NetFoundry, today
The hyperconnected, AI-accelerated world requires simple and secure. And this is exactly how NetFoundry is helping some of the world’s leaders.
For example, NetFoundry now secures critical infrastructure on 3 continents, connects mission-critical data at the majority of the top 10 US banks and solves networking complexities for 2 of the top 5 Fortune 500 companies. NetFoundry is most often consumed as cloud native, zero trust native NaaS (network as a service), but is also deployed in on-premises and even air-gapped environments.
NetFoundry also helps leading product providers in areas such as industrial automation and managed services to ship secure-by-design products. That use of NetFoundry is the first Intel-inside, OEM-type model model for zero trust networking. The result of the partnership is the product providers’ customers buy secure-by-design products.
Enterprise – Where the world is going and how NetFoundry helps
As noted above, some of the world’s largest enterprises are already benefiting from NetFoundry’s secure-by-design networking. This vanguard group is multiplying. This is because the Internet is the new WAN, and the application is the new edge:
- The old WAN model? Dead.
- SASE, VPN, ZTNA and firewalls which attempt to filter the entire Internet? Dead.
- Secure WAN with an insecure supply chain? Dead.
This means IT can drain the swamp of the world’s most expensive alphabet soup (SASE, ZTNA, MPLS, SSE, VPN, FW, IDS, IPS, DMZ, SWG, CASB, etc.). Their new model will center on secure browsers and NetFoundry-powered secure-by-design network overlays. There is more in this new model, and NetFoundry is just one layer of the overall ecosystem delivering it. Secure-by-design networking is spreading, rapidly.
Providers – Where the world is going and how NetFoundry helps
As described above, some the world’s leaders are already licensing the NetFoundry software and leveraging NetFoundry zero trust native NaaS to ship secure-by-design products. This early adopter group is also rapidly expanding, and includes everything from multicloud deployments to securing connections within air-gapped environments.
Legislation such as the European Cyber-Resiliency Act (EU CRA) is now mandating that all providers of connected products adopt this secure-by-design approach. In the US, groups including CISA, the NSA and the FBI are also mandating secure-by-design products.
Market forces are also pushing the world towards secure-by-design products. If provider #1 ships a secure-by-design product, and provider #2 requires you to take an inherently insecure product and then try to make it secure on your own after the fact…which will you choose? Built-in is both simpler and more secure than bolted-on, so the market is increasingly demanding secure-by-design products.
Innovation – Where the world is going and how NetFoundry helps
Some of the world’s most innovative operations, development and networking teams are also leveraging NetFoundry. This movement is also picking up steam.
While the world ponders if AI will eat the world, open source continues to eat everything. NetFoundry changed secure networking into composable, programmable, extensible software. NetFoundry created, open sourced and now maintains OpenZiti – Linux for secure networking.
OpenZiti means anything can ship with a built-in, open source, zero trust native, global network overlay. This includes individual applications, far edge compute (NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi, etc.), servers, databases, API gateways, browsers, NICs, reverse proxies, firewalls, routers, edge servers, robots, PLCs, drones, AI agents, firmware, operating systems, and so much more.
The world will look back and wonder how connected products historically shipped as default insecure. A recent analogy I heard was that the old network model was like constructing a building in an earthquake zone and afterwards telling the buyer they needed to retrofit the building because it was not built to withstand even the slightest tremble.
The next phase for effortlessly extraordinary, secure-by-design networking
NetFoundry is happy that we are securely delivering billions of sessions per year in some of the world’s most difficult environments, and we are thrilled to be partnering with SYN Ventures and strategics to bring secure-by-design networking to the rest of the world.
