The Internet wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Connecting computers should have been simple, but decades of patchwork fixes—NATs, firewalls, TLS certificates—have made it anything but. Tailscale exists to change that, and every so often, we hit a milestone that reminds us just how far we’ve come.
Today, we’re celebrating two milestones at once!
First, we’ve surpassed 10,000 business customers. Just 10 months ago, we were at 5,000—a number that took us over four years to reach. This kind of momentum isn’t just exciting; it’s validation that the world is ready for something simpler, more secure, and built for how people actually work today.
Those 10,000 business customers are just one part of the story. For every AI startup building the future, there’s someone running a homelab, sharing files with friends, or securely connecting to their Minecraft server—all using Tailscale. We’re all part of the same story: people taking back control of their networks and making the Internet simpler for themselves and their teams.
Second, we’re welcoming Grace Lin as our new SVP of Operations. Grace isn’t just an expert in scaling companies; she’s an expert in doing it with thoughtfulness, integrity, and precision. At Cloudflare, she helped grow the company into a household name while keeping its culture and vision intact. She’s joining us at exactly the right moment to help Tailscale grow without losing what makes it special—not just for our business customers, but for everyone who uses Tailscale.
Why this matters
Tailscale isn’t just for developers tinkering on their Raspberry Pi at home (though we love you and your quirky DNS). Increasingly, we’re seeing adoption from cutting-edge companies in AI—names like Mistral AI, and Cohere. AI-first companies are using Tailscale not because they want another tool in their stack, but because they can’t build what they’re building without it.
We’ve also seen accelerating growth among personal users and small teams. The Internet isn’t just for big companies: it’s for everyone. And the same tools that help AI startups manage multi-cloud environments also help individuals solve the networking challenges in their homes, homelabs, and daily lives. The beauty of Tailscale is it’s just as useful for connecting a Kubernetes cluster as it is for connecting your laptop to your robot vacuum.
The problem with big numbers
Hitting 10,000 business customers is a big deal. But it’s also kind of not. I mean, 10,000 customers is great. It pays the bills. But the Internet has billions of people on it. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible.
Those 10,000 customers? They’re all part of a large and growing network—millions of Tailscale-enabled devices connected across personal and professional use cases, proving that simple, secure networking isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s foundational.
This is where Grace comes in. We didn’t bring her on just to help us get better spreadsheets or more predictable service delivery (though both will be nice). She's joining because the Internet won't fix itself. If Tailscale is going to be the connective tissue for the next era of computing, we need someone who knows how to scale operations without adding the kind of complexity we’re trying to eliminate.
A New Internet for everyone
Tailscale is weird. It doesn’t make your app run faster. It doesn’t generate flashy dashboards. It doesn’t tell you what stock to buy next week. It just…works. It’s invisible infrastructure, like plumbing. And like plumbing, you only notice it when it doesn’t work.
The simplicity of Tailscale hides something profound. It’s not just about connecting devices—it’s about connecting everything. Your laptop, the application you just deployed, the AWS instance you spun up five minutes ago, or your entire Kubernetes cluster—they all get their own place in the Tailscale universe. Call it a “home address” for everything you care about online.
And once they’re connected, they just work. No NATs to wrestle, no firewalls to appease, no obscure error messages when two services mysteriously can’t talk to each other. If you’ve spent years fighting those battles, it doesn’t just feel like magic, it feels like reclaiming time you didn’t know you’d lost.
Closing thoughts
This isn't the finish line. It’s a step toward something much bigger. We want Tailscale to be as ubiquitous as the Internet itself, not because we want to own the Internet, but because the Internet can't be allowed to fail at its original purpose: connecting your devices to each other.
To everyone who’s trusted us in the years so far: whether you’re a business customer, a free-tier user, or someone on our Personal Plus plan—thank you. You’re part of something much bigger than a networking tool. If you’re not using Tailscale yet, don’t worry. We’re just getting started.
Avery Pennarun
