It began as an open-source project in 2013, but the "application ingress" platform known as Ngrok is now a venture-backed company.
On Tuesday, the team announced it has raised its first venture equity round — a $50 million Series A. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also included Coatue.
Founder Alan Shreve has been operating off of revenue from its paying customers since he incorporated in 2015. Ngrok today has more than 5 million developers using its platform, including 30,000 who are paid users.
Shreve wouldn't disclose revenue or user growth goals but told me that he will be investing the new capital across the board including hiring, product improvements, marketing and go-to-market strategies. It has tripled its workforce this year and currently has more than 60 employees.
"We've built this business entirely on customer revenue and a focus on delivering for real customers… and that's not going to change," Shreve told me. "You can't be distracted by the fundraise or count it as having delivered the real value."
The company simplifies the way developers deliver web and mobile applications — really anything that can be deployed over the internet — securely and seamlessly.
"We are an application's front door," Shreve said. "Without Ngrok, developers essentially tape together multiple different services… open-source projects, proxies, cloud services to essentially be that middle-man that sits between the world and their application."
Their competition includes companies like Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netmaker and Nebula, according to TechCrunch.
For its paid users, Ngrok offers subscriptions that start at $20 a month depending on their usage and needs.
When Ngrok launched as an open-source project, it was designed for developers who needed a better way to access information on their laptops, Shreve told me. Now it powers application programming interfaces, or APIs, for secure ingress across a broad array of software and developer tools.
"Ngrok has built a reputation as basically the de-facto standard to put anything on the internet, and over the next two years, we want to become the de-facto standard for production ingress," Ngrok's Chief Revenue Officer Ben Sabrin told me. "So it's about, we're no longer just a development tool. We are a platform that you can rely on to deliver production applications."
In November, federal authorities identified Ngrok as a tool that suspected Iranian hackers had used in a cybersecurity incident that targeted an unnamed government agency as early as February.
"Ngrok was misused" in that incident, Shreve said. "This kind of misuse is always an arms race to try to out compete folks who are misusing the platform but we continue to make investments to block that kind of misuse."
