Building the New Internet: Our Continued Partnership with Tailscale

When we first met Avery Pennarun, Tailscale’s co-founder and CEO, he started by telling us he had thought of the name for the company before coming up with the idea. After years of working on “Google scale” products he wanted to build solutions for the “tail scale”, or solutions for products that don’t need to scale up to millions and millions of users.

Now of course some products need to reach that hyper scale, which necessarily requires a tremendous amount of complexity. His insight was that many products, most products even, don’t ever reach that scale and prematurely opt into a level of complexity that leaves them brittle, expensive to maintain, slower to iterate, vulnerable to attacks, the list goes on. His solution? Help “make the internet work the way it’s supposed to” as he told us recently on Spotlight On. 

Tailscale achieves this by building the best way to connect any two devices at the network layer. Leveraging and building around the popular open source project WireGuard, Tailscale has built a product that developers love. No really, they love it. Product love like that is rare to find in this business, and  it’s hard to miss it with Tailscale. Hobbyists, individuals, developers, have discovered Tailscale in personal use cases, and oftentimes bring it to work.

While many are using us for our zero-configuration VPN product, increasingly we’re finding exciting emergent use cases. One area where we’ve seen a surge of demand is from AI startups, which rely on Tailscale to manage the complex networking challenges that come with running workloads across multiple cloud providers. As Avery puts it, “Tailscale is sort of the shovel seller for the AI world.”

We believe Tailscale’s growth is hitting an inflection point. They recently announced doubling their customer base to 10,000 customers (it’s higher now) and we believe they are poised for even greater growth. This is why we are thrilled to announce that Accel has led a $160 million series C funding round into the business. Working with founders who truly see the world differently is a rare privilege. We’re honored by the trust Avery and the Davids have placed in us to be there through all the special and challenging moments. And we look forward to being their committed partner throughout this next phase.