Tailscale has raised $160M

Summary

Tailscale has raised $160 million USD ($230 million CAD) in our Series C, led by Accel with participation from CRV, Insight Partners, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital. Existing angel investor George Kurtz - CEO of Crowdstrike is also included in this round, as well as Anthony Casalena - CEO of Squarespace, who joins as a new investor for Series C.There’s a lot packed into that sentence. But the real question is — why should you care?When we started Tailscale in 2019, we weren't even sure we wanted to be a venture-backed company. We just wanted to fix networking. Or, more specifically, make networking disappear — reduce the number of times anyone had to think about NAT traversal or VPN configurations ever again.That might sound simple, but it wasn’t. Here we are, six years later, and millions of people rely on Tailscale every day, connecting their homelabs, their apps, their companies, their AI workloads. Some use it because they love networking and want better tools. Many use it because they have better things to do – they don’t want to think about networking at all.Either way, the outcome is the same: things connect, securely and privately, without the traditional headaches.Even though we already had a long runway, we raised this Series C because we realized the world had started raining opportunities. We want to go faster where it matters:Removing frictionScaling the network without scaling complexityMaking identity, not IP addresses, the core of secure connectivityThe Internet wasn’t built with identity in mind. It was built for location — packets sent between machines, not people. Everything that came after — VPNs, firewalls, Zero Trust — are attempts to patch over that original gap.We think there’s a better way forward. We're calling it identity-first networking.When you connect to something with Tailscale, you’re not just an IP connecting to a server at some IP. You’re connecting to your app, your teammate, your service — wherever it happens to be running right no...