Tailscale Secures $100M Round for Mesh VPN

May 11, 2022

Tailscale secured a US $100 Million Series B funding round led by CRV and global software investor Insight Partners with participation from Accel, Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and prominent individual investors. The round reflects Tailscale’s rapid adoption amongst best-in-class developers and DevOps teams who need to connect to resources easily and securely in the cloud, on-premises, and everywhere in between. Leveraging zero-trust architecture from BeyondCorp at Google and the WireGuard protocol, Tailscale makes network security accessible to teams of any scale.

Founded in 2019, Tailscale has experienced 1,200% YoY growth and continues to sustain 20% growth quarter over quarter in active monthly users, primarily due to organic word-of-mouth. The investment will enable Tailscale to hire top engineering talent to expand the company’s product-led growth, as well as scale out its go-to-market and strategic partner initiatives.

Avery Pennarun, Co-Founder and CEO of Tailscale. “Since its early days, the Internet has become more and more complicated, centralized, and insecure. We've been pleased to see unexpectedly exuberant, rapid adoption of Tailscale across the community and among our customers. This aggressive funding round represents a clear signal from the market that investors believe in our vision — the Internet's original vision — of small, trusted, human-scale networks, interconnected.”

Reid Christian, General Partner at CRV: “Protecting access to devices, networks, and critical systems is the first wall of defense for organizations against bad actors, but ensuring this level of security without getting in development teams’ way remains a bottleneck for so many organizations. Tailscale clears this bottleneck for every developer, on every device, and every application, making it simple to enforce granular access controls while keeping security teams compliant.”

Network Connectivity and Security Made Simple

There has traditionally been a deep disconnect between connectivity, ease-of-use, and security best practices. Tailscale eliminates this tension by making private network connectivity fast, effortless, and seamless while allowing security teams to rest easy with end-to-end encryption, no single point of failure, near-instantaneous setup, and zero-config.

Tailscale integrates with existing identity services including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Okta for seamless authentication and delivers an all-in-one Zero Trust solution for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Privileged Access Management (PAM) that simply works. It is based on WireGuard, the open source, opinionated standard for secure connectivity, and is set up and configured in a matter of minutes on average, while other VPN solutions take weeks to fully implement and several hours a week to maintain.

Tailscale is quickly establishing itself as the leader in the space, and integrates with cloud native tooling that developers depend on such as Syncthing, VScode, and Caddy Server. Tailscale removes common remote development hurdles by securely connecting the right people to the right resources. Tailscale has released remote development integrations with GitPod, Coder, Materialize, GitHub Codespaces, and Indent in the last six months alone.

Enterprises including Oxide Computing Company, Dusty Robotics, and VersaBank rely on Tailscale to transform complex network connections into something that is trustworthy and simple.

Rebecca Liu-Doyle, Managing Director, Insight Partners: “Tailscale is ringing in a new paradigm of secure networking — one that is centered around intuitive design and pure user delight. Tailscale has captured the minds, and more importantly, the hearts, of developers within organizations of all sizes. We look forward to partnering with this incredible team on the journey ahead.”

Jessie Frazelle, Chief Product Officer, Oxide Computing: “Tailscale enables us to move fast and not worry about VPN infrastructure. The simple user interface and easy install on any device is something we’ve wanted for years.”

Oliver Shaw, CTO and Co-Founder, Jasper: “As the CTO, I can quickly set up new instances of software like Sourcegraph that can be accessed securely by our team. Our engineers can also quickly and securely connect to our Consul nodes running in our secure AWS VPC for debugging, which was a major pain point. We’re immeasurably faster and so much happier.”