Conventional SSL VPNs proceed to dominate enterprise community safety, burdening organisations with fixed patching, giant gross sales groups, and closed-source complexity. Berlin-based NetBird solves this as the one European open-source Zero Belief platform, emphasising product-led development, community-driven improvement, and seamless person expertise.
NetBird right this moment introduced a $10M Collection A spherical led by Tempo Capital, with participation from Nauta Capital, InReach Ventures, and Antler. This funding fuels its rise as a clear different for world groups ditching legacy VPNs.
Making safe personal networking a basic proper for each firm
Based by Mikhail “Misha” Bragin (CEO) and Maycon Santos (CTO), NetBird is about to flip enterprise safety on its head.
Bragin tells TFN, “We initially weren’t making an attempt to start out an organization in any respect, it began as a private facet undertaking in mid-2020/ We had been constructing a privacy-first Dropbox different that you can run at dwelling on a Raspberry Pi, and entry from anyplace — mainly one thing easy sufficient that even non-technical customers might set it up.”
He continues, “To make the product work, they ended up constructing a peer-to-peer encrypted networking layer utilizing WireGuard, coping with NAT traversal, gadget discovery, and all the standard networking ache. That’s when it clicked: the actual downside wasn’t storage, it was that safe networking continues to be unnecessarily arduous, particularly for contemporary groups.”
NetBird’s open-source Zero Belief platform overlays safe peer-to-peer connections on any community, eliminating gateways, ports, and complicated configs. Key options embrace self-hosted deployment, low-friction setup, and natural development through GitHub (launched in 2021), now connecting tons of of 1000’s of customers and machines worldwide.
As Bragin explains: “Enterprise community safety has historically been gated behind lengthy gross sales cycles and infinite demos earlier than groups can expertise actual worth. We’ve modified that mannequin. At NetBird, the code title for our GTM technique is ‘Proof of Idea Begins at Residence,’ which means customers can strive the product totally free with minimal friction and expertise its worth firsthand of their personal homelabs earlier than rolling it out to manufacturing. Our group has turn out to be our strongest advocate, shaping the product way over any conventional enterprise advertising ever might.”
Not like closed-source giants like Fortinet, Sophos, and SonicWall, NetBird focuses on transparency, group suggestions, and European sovereignty.
What about range?
Once we requested about range, Bragin shares, “We don’t publish formal range stats, however the group is genuinely very worldwide, throughout plenty of international locations and backgrounds. Each founders are immigrants to Germany”
What’s subsequent?
This $10M will supercharge engineering and product groups to unlock new use instances, speed up characteristic supply, and assist surging buyer migrations.
Bragin concludes, “The aim is to turn out to be the primary resolution for contemporary community safety, and the default selection when corporations need to transfer away from legacy VPNs. Which means scaling adoption whereas conserving the product easy. It means investing closely in reliability and efficiency. It additionally means constructing deeper integrations into the trendy infrastructure stack, and persevering with to develop the open supply ecosystem and group round NetBird.”
