Most companies have worked hard over the years to produce strong and secure internet connections in the office, but over the last several years in particular, as more employees have been working away from the office, it’s been difficult for IT pros to reproduce that speed and safety.
Cloudbrink, a startup launched in 2019, has built a solution to bring that same safety and speed found in the building to wherever the employee happens to be working (to the extent possible). Today, the company announced a $25 million investment.
“We’ve taken this entire step that was traditionally built for in office and compressed that into a software and a pure SaaS service that you just consume. No matter where users go, they download the Cloudbrink app, and get that inherently super fast and secure experience to all workloads,” company co-founder and CEO Prakash Mana told TechCrunch.
The company has built a kind of software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) and the solution works to improve speed automatically in the background. It can detect if there is enough bandwidth on your home or local coffee shop network. Then, if the connection is starting to deteriorate, it will preemptively replace dropped packets, even before those packets complete their cycles.
The end result of that is that whatever online service you’re using, whether it’s Salesforce or Zoom, it will feel like a smooth experience because the Cloudbrink software is fixing connection issues on the fly in the background, according to Mana.
The startup has created three components to the solution. The first is an app on the end-user’s phone. The second is what the company calls “fast edges” or access points located near end users, and finally software that is deployed in the employer’s data center or cloud environment, which is designed to provide zero-trust security for the entire system.
The company launched in 2019 and spent the first year and a half building the solution before releasing the product about 10 months ago. “We made the service available in specific segments for specific customers about 10 months ago. And since then, we have seen massive momentum in the market. We continue to onboard a double-digit number of customers and we have global users in the range of thousands,” he said.
“We have been growing at five to 7x. And given the massive momentum we are seeing in the market, given the fact that this hybrid work continues to be a top-tier challenge in every enterprise that we speak with, we anticipate the same level of continual, more accelerated growth in coming years.”
The startup currently has 50 employees and as it grows with this new investment, Mana says building a diverse company is an important element for him. He says that in some ways, the pandemic helped in that regard by allowing him to hire from anywhere. “Being able to hire anywhere across the planet gives us the flexibility to make sure we bring diverse personalities, different cultures and amazing talent to Cloudbrink,” he said.
Today’s $25 million investment was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from The Fabric co-creation studio, First Rays VP, Streamlined Ventures, BluePointe Ventures, CMF, Qualcomm Ventures and several industry angels.