SiliconANGLE reported on Tuesday that VPN startup Tailscale has raised $160 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was spearheaded by Accel, with participation from notable investors including CRV, Insight Partners, CrowdStrike, and Squarespace CEO, Anthony Casalena. This latest funding round values Tailscale at $1.5 billion.
Tailscale has developed a proprietary VPN technology that enables direct system-to-system connections, bypassing traditional gateways.
The company claims that while conventional VPNs route data through gateways, causing latency issues, Tailscale’s approach eliminates this bottleneck, significantly enhancing performance. To address the periodic IP address changes common in traditional VPNs, Tailscale has implemented an innovative solution that assigns a unique public key to each device and manages security protocols via a central server.
Tailscale offers its VPN service free of charge to individual users, with premium plans available for those seeking advanced security features and increased usage limits. The fresh influx of capital will allow Tailscale to expand its engineering and product development teams, with a focus on enhancing the free version and ensuring long-term compatibility across platforms.