Tailscale announced it has raised $160 million (C$230 million) in Series C funding, led by Accel with CRV, Insight Partners, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital participation. Existing angel investor George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, is also included in this round, as is Anthony Casalena, CEO of Squarespace.
When Tailscale was launched in 2019, the company started with a vision of fixing networking and reducing the number of times anyone had to think about NAT traversal or VPN configurations.
Now millions of people depend on Tailscale every day to connect their homelabs, apps, AI workloads, and companies. Some of the company’s customers include SAP, Telus, Motorola, and Duolingo.
The company decided to raise the Series C round of funding to accelerate growth, scaling the network without scaling complexity, and making identity, not IP addresses, the core of secure connectivity.
KEY QUOTES:
“We think there’s a better way forward. We’re calling it identity-first networking.”
“When you connect to something with Tailscale, you’re not just an IP connecting to a server at some IP. You’re connecting to your app, your teammate, your service — wherever it happens to be running right now. That’s how it should work.”
This new funding helps us support all of that, faster. We’re going to grow our engineering and product teams to unlock more markets faster. We’re also investing 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.
- Avery Pennarun, co-founder and CEO of Tailscale
