VPN services for business

2022. NordVPN raises $100M at a $1.6B valuation



Lithuania-based Nord Security, the startup behind one of the bigger paid VPN providers, NordVPN, has raised $100 million. NordVPN and the other security and identity management products that Nord sells — they include the NordPass password manager, NordLocker for cloud sync and storage, NordLayer for network access for businesses and developer tools to build custom VPNs — have collectively grown to 15 million users over the years. And having a customer base that was primarily consumers also meant potentially less due diligence around how the product worked. More recently, though, Nord’s growing enterprise business, along with this latest addition of high-profile investors and a big valuation, all give the startup not just more exposure, but potentially more oversight.


2020. Tailscale raises $12M for its WireGuard-based corporate VPN



Tailscale, which is building a better corporate VPN by leveraging a modern protocol and focusing on ease of implementation, has raised a $12M. Traditional VPN dosn’t scale well. The gateway is a bottleneck and you can experience long loading times when there are a lot of people connected at the same time. Tailscale starts with a different VPN protocol - WireGuard, a lightweight VPN protocol that relies on a combination of public and private keys to establish an encrypted tunnel between two clients. When you want to connect to the internal services, Tailscale asks you to log in using your company’s identity provider, such as G Suite, Okta, Active Directory, etc. A connection is then established between your laptop and the Git server or your laptop and the wiki server. There’s no bottleneck due to the VPN gateway as the Git server and the wiki server act as their own VPN gateways.