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?
Venture money is a tool.
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.
This round isn’t about us — it’s about what we build next, for you.
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 friction
- Scaling the network without scaling complexity
- Making identity, not IP addresses, the core of secure connectivity
The 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 now. That’s how it should work.
Why now? Why raise this much?
The last year made the need for this even more obvious. The AI industry, in particular, is struggling to rapidly mature its underlying infrastructure. Connecting GPUs across clouds, securing workloads across continents, migrating between cloud providers — it’s messy, it’s hard, and it breaks all the time.
A surprising number of leading AI companies — Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, Groq, Hugging Face — are now building on Tailscale to solve exactly this.
It’s not just AI. Companies like Instacart, SAP, Telus, Motorola, and Duolingo and thousands of others use Tailscale to make their hybrid, remote, and cloud networks sane again.
This new funding helps us support all of that, faster. We're going to grow our engineering and product teams to unlock more markets faster. We're also investing further in our free support for free customers promise and our backward compatibility forever platform. Business is booming, and taking investment now lets us stay focused on making the network just work, whether you’re a startup, a Fortune 500, or a person running a Minecraft server.
Who’s behind this round?
We’re lucky to have Accel’s Amit Kumar — who led our Series A — leading this round too, now from their growth fund. And we’re excited to welcome Anthony Casalena of Squarespace, alongside returning investors CRV, Heavybit, Insight, and Uncork, and George Kurtz - CEO of Crowdstrike.
The mix here matters. These are people who understand that the network is the right place for the security and identity layer. The boundary is shifting from the datacenter to the device — and from the device to the person holding it, or the container running on it.
Thanks for being here.
We wouldn’t be at this point without the thousands of businesses — and the millions of people — who've bet on us so far. You believed networking could be better, even when you didn’t want to have to think about it.
That’s fine. We think about it so you don’t have to.
Thanks for being part of this. More soon.
— Avery
Avery Pennarun
