Secure network firm Tailscale has raised $160 million – in a resounding vote of confidence by new and existing investors in its prospects for growth in what are otherwise challenging global economic conditions. 

Tailscale’s Series C funding round included seven investors and was led by early backer Accel, with participation also from angel investor and Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz, among others. The funding will be used to “grow our engineering and product teams to unlock more markets faster.”

Tailscale builds on the lightweight WireGuard VPN protocol (which lets you set up encrypted tunnels between your computer, VM, or container). Earlier this year it boasted of having hit 10,000 customers; its leaders want Tailscale to be the “connective tissue for the next era of computing.” 

"What if the Internet just worked like it was supposed to?; what if we all just had a static IP address, and a DNS name? …and the address migrated around the world with you? …and you could connect to any of your devices no matter where they were? …and it was always encrypted? …and there was always a correctly configured firewall? ...and you never had to worry about certificates? …and every device in your organization was tied to a user identity and SSO and MFA? …and all this just happened automatically?" - Tailscale CEO Avery Pennarun in 2022.

It lets users spin up a “mesh” network that unlike traditional VPNs doesn’t route traffic via a “central” VPN gateway; a central control plane server doesn’t carry traffic; just exchanges encryption keys and sets policies. The actual network is effectively a peer-to-peer one, with rules set centrally.

Users can, for example, essentially create a secure private network in which a Raspberry Pi, or a VM in Oracle Cloud, or a Kubernetes cluster can talk to each other just by machine name.

Tailscale Series C: Funding for more backward compatibility

Tailscale was founded by a trio of former Google engineers in 2019 to “reduce the number of times anyone had to think about NAT traversal or VPN configurations ever again” as CEO Avery Pennarun put it this week.

Talking about the Series C Tailscale funding round, he said: “The Internet wasn’t built with identity in mind. It was built for location — packets sent between machines, not people. Everything that came after — VPNs, firewalls, Zero Trust — are attempts to patch over that original gap.”

Pennarun added: “The AI industry, in particular, is struggling to rapidly mature its underlying infrastructure. Connecting GPUs across clouds, securing workloads across continents, migrating between cloud providers — it’s messy, it’s hard, and it breaks all the time” he said, noting that a “surprising number of leading AI companies — Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, Groq, Hugging Face — are now building on Tailscale to solve exactly this.”

The company also promised to use the funding to invest “further in our free support for free customers promise and our backward compatibility forever platform. Business is booming, and taking investment now lets us stay focused on making the network just work, whether you’re a startup, a Fortune 500, or a person running a Minecraft server…” said Pennarun.

(There’s a moderately more technical explanation of Tailscale here and more detailed guidance in setup documentation here, for those curious.)

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