Netmaker launches with $2.3m funding to fix cloud networking with WireGuard

Netmaker, a cloud networking startup, announced $2.3 million in funding to launch their "superhighway for secure cloud networks." The round was led by Lytical Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and SaxeCap among others, following their graduation from Y-Combinator. Netmaker offers a platform built on WireGuard which transforms the way companies integrate their networks to make them safe, dynamic and up to 15 times faster than alternatives.

In addition to the funding, Netmaker is announcing the 1.0 release of their community product, and an Enterprise Edition, which offers HA networking, metrics and access controls for users.

Modern applications are significantly more complex than they appear. While individuals see a website or smartphone app, in the background, a vast ecosystem of infrastructure and applications must be connected together to make this software work. Today, those connections are created by operations teams who must follow a process which is expensive, time-consuming, and painstaking. That's where Netmaker comes in.

Alex Feiszli, CEO, Netmaker: "We created Netmaker because we had to. We saw this gap between what we're capable of doing with cloud computing, and what networking allowed us to do. We realized that there was nothing on the market that could solve this problem, so we had to build it ourselves." 

Netmaker allows applications to access each other directly and securely, without going through a central gateway. It does this with peer-to-peer virtual networks, automated over a client-server model. The server manages the keys, addresses, and discovery of peers, and sends this information to clients, which enables advanced routing operations to move traffic into, out of, and throughout the network. Recent trends in hybrid cloud, edge computing, and IoT have made this pattern a necessity.

Lucas Nelson, Partner, Lytical Ventures: "Netmaker makes it simple to abstract away the physical network, allowing IT departments to create logical networks in minutes. Now, putting IoT devices with 5G onto the same flat network with a control environment can be done in minutes instead of days or weeks. I believe it's a tool that will be in every IT department's kit in the coming year."

Feiszli and Carns previously worked together building cloud software and led a team of multi-cloud platform engineers at IBM. During the pandemic, the duo moved to Asheville, NC. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the town is known more for its craft breweries than its tech startup scene, but Feiszli and Carns have big plans to bring the cloud to the 'Land of the Sky'.

Netmaker was released on GitHub in March of 2021, and the adoption was swift. There are now over 1,200 organizations and individuals running the platform. This traction brought Netmaker to the attention of Y-Combinator, which further accelerated the company's popularity. Growth in active platforms since the start of 2022 has averaged 32% MoM.

www.netmaker.io