Cloud Networking Startup Netmaker Launches with $2.3M in Funding

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A startup in cloud networking called Netmaker has raised $2.3 million to set up its ‘superhighway for secure cloud networks.’ The funding round was led by Lytical Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and SaxeCap among others, following their graduation from Y-Combinator. Netmaker provides a platform based on WireGuard. It would tranform the way businesses integrate their networks to make them safe, dynamic, and “up to 15 times quicker than alternatives.”

Along with the funding, Netmaker is also announcing the 1.0 release of their community product and the availability of an Enterprise Edition, which provides users with access controls, metrics, and HA networking.

The complexity of modern applications is far greater than first meets the eye, stated netmaker. While users are seeing a website or smartphone app, a massive ecosystem of infrastructure and applications must be connected in the background for this software to function. These connections are now made by operations teams, who must adhere to an expensive, time-consuming, and tedious process, added Netmaker. In such a situation, their cloud networking offering can be useful.

“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,” said Alex Feiszli, CEO and co-founder of Netmaker. “We realized that there was nothing on the market that could solve this problem, so we had to build it ourselves.”

Founded in 2021 and based in Asheville, North Carolina, Netmaker is led by co-founders and IBM alums Alex Feiszli (CEO) and Dillon Carns (CTO).

IoT, 5G

Alex Feiszli, CEO and co-founder of 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,” said Alex Feiszli, CEO and co-founder of Netmaker.

Applications can connect to one another directly and securely using Netmaker without passing via a central gateway. Peer-to-peer virtual networks that are automated over a client-server approach are used to do this. Advanced routing activities are made possible by the server by managing the keys, addresses, and peer discovery and sending this information to clients. This allows traffic to be moved into, out of, and throughout the network.

Netmaker makes it simple to abstract away the physical network, allowing IT departments to create logical networks in minutes,” said Lucas Nelson, Partner at Lytical Ventures. “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.”

Prior to joining IBM, Mr. Feiszli and Mr. Carns collaborated on the development of cloud software and oversaw a group of multi-cloud platform engineers. The two went to Asheville, North Carolina during the pandemic. The town, which is tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is better known for its craft brewers than for its startup tech culture, but Feiszli and Carns have big plans to bring the cloud to the ‘Land of the Sky.’

When Netmaker was made available on GitHub in March 2021, it was quickly adopted. Over 1,200 businesses and individuals are now using the platform. Due to this traction, Y-Combinator became aware of Netmaker, which helped the business’s growth. Since the beginning of 2022, active platform growth has averaged 32% MoM.