ASHEVILLE – Cloud networking startup Netmaker has a new infusion of capital, and the Ashville-based company is now poised to launch what it called the “superhighway for secure cloud networks” in a statement.
The company, which became the first startup company from western North Carolina to complete Y-Combinator, now offers a platform built on WireGuard that it says can allow companies to transform how they’re able to integrate their networks to make them faster and safer.
Now, the company will have $2.3 million in capital to deploy. In a statement, Netmaker CEO Alex Feiszli said the startup built the platform “because we had to.”
Lytical Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and SaxeCap, which co-led the fundraising round, clearly saw promise, as well.
“We saw this gap between what we’re capable of doing with cloud computing, and what networking allowed us to do,” said Feiszli. “We realized that there was nothing on the market that could solve this problem, so we had to build it ourselves,” continued Feiszli.
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A new platform
Here’s how it works: The platform enables applications to access each other directly and securely. No central gateway is necessary, the company notes. Instead, the access occurs on peer-to-peer virtual networks, which are automated over a client-server model, the company describes.
“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,” a statement reads.
Feiszli says that the latest trends in hybrid cloud and edge computing made this pattern a necessity.
Prior to launching Netmaker, Feiszli and co-founder and CTO Dylan Carns worked to build cloud software, leading a team of multi-cloud platform engineers at IBM. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna praised Red Hat, which IBM owns, last week as the Fortune 500 company released earnings that outperformed analyst’s expectations.
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Feiszli and Carns moved to Asheville. They released Netmaker on GitHub in March of 2021. Since, the company says that there are now more than 1,200 organizations and individuals running the platform.
At that point, Netmaker caught the attention of Y-Combinator, which further accelerated the company’s popularity. Now, the company is set up to continue its growth.
Since the start of 2022, the company has averaged 32% month-over-month growth for the number of active platforms, according to a statement.
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