Investing in Twingate, a VPN your team will actually love

For me, the word "VPN" conjures up frustration: sluggish network connectivity with videos buffering and downloads slowing to a crawl, plus general clunkiness where certain applications stop working altogether. Most of us have had experience with VPNs at work —they’ve unfortunately been a standard way to access corporate networks for decades at this point.

The problem stems from how traditional VPNs are architected: you connect to a VPN server which then forwards your network traffic to its final destination and then forwards the response traffic that comes back to you. It becomes the single choke point for all your data and an extra leg that has to be traveled for every request. That's a lot of overhead, especially if the VPN server is far from you or becomes overloaded.

The price you pay in speed may have made sense in the past when all IT resources were on-premise and the VPN could govern secure access to them. In today's world, the rise of SaaS apps that run in the cloud has rendered that model obsolete. Why should your Zoom calls or Gmail attachment downloads slow to a crawl over a VPN for no security benefit? Additionally, VPN servers have themselves become a prime target for hackers. Capture the VPN server and the hacker gets the keys to the entire kingdom.This is where Twingate comes in. We first got to know Tony Huie, the co-founder & CEO, when he joined SignalFire from Dropbox as an investing partner. When Tony got the itch to go back to operating and founded Twingate, we were thrilled to back him at seed. The vision he laid out for a modern rethinking of the VPN (and access controls more broadly) resonated and the technology behind the product was battle-tested.

By intelligently routing your traffic directly based on its destination, Twingate eliminates the VPN server middleman. It maps your networks with no need for on-prem or cloud infrastructure changes, then analyzes every network request to verify the user, device, and context. Twingate then uses resource-level split tunneling, NAT traversal, and private proxies to ensure there are no user performance or latency problems.Twingate’s ease of use for both end-users and admins has been a focus for the team which has deep Dropbox roots and an appreciation for the power of great UX. Equipped with SignalFire’s Beacon Talent hiring engine, recruiting team, and data scientists, Tony has led Twingate to tremendous growth this past year and a half. It also won over 50 awards from G2 including easiest to use, best support, and best ROI!

We’re pleased to participate in the latest $42 million Series B round of financing which the company announced today in Forbes. The team is on a roll and they have an exciting roadmap to build atop their initial VPN replacement use case, helping companies of all sizes migrate to a new security model based on Zero Trust. If you want to replace your VPN with something your team will love, you can get set up with Twingate in just minutes.

*Portfolio company founders listed above have not received any compensation for this feedback and did not invest in a SignalFire fund. Please refer to our disclosures page for additional disclosures.