ngrok Raises $50M in First Fundraise to Meet Demand for Frictionless Application Ingress

SAN FRANCISCO — Dec. 13, 2022 — ngrok, the developers’ choice for secure application ingress, today announced that it closed $50 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Coatue. With its first fundraise and after widespread organic adoption, ngrok will scale to meet increasing demand for its simplified, API-first ingress-as-a-service platform across a variety of enterprise use cases.

“Traditional networking requires infrastructure teams to operate legacy proxies, load balancers, or VPNs, which is a slow, manual process. As developers face substantial pressure to deliver applications faster, they need more self-service and automation,” said Alan Shreve, founder and CEO, ngrok. “ngrok is redefining application connectivity and control with a simplified, API-first approach to ingress that helps developers get apps online faster and run them anywhere while enabling all the necessary security controls and working with the tools they love.”

Loved by more than 5 million developers around the world, ngrok inverts traditional application networking by decoupling ingress from infrastructure. With one line of code, developers get instant ingress to applications and services with authentication, observability, and other critical controls.

An outlier in the software industry, ngrok achieved massive, worldwide adoption prior to raising any capital. Doubling its revenue year over year, the company has been solely funded by more than 30,000 paying customers, including global leaders and emerging innovators, such as Databricks, Zendesk, Copado, Klaviyo, and SonarSource. And every day, more than 4,000 new developers choose ngrok for instant ingress, and the world’s top technology companies — including Microsoft, GitHub, Okta, Shopify, Zoom, and Twilio — recommend ngrok in their documentation.

“As an industry, we talk about the developer journey and the need to deliver apps faster, but what is often overlooked is the complexity involved in delivering applications to users,” said Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, who will join ngrok’s board of directors as part of the round. “ngrok enables developers to instantly deliver their applications to any user, anywhere, while ensuring the applications are secure, observable, and performant. This leads to better developer productivity, lower infrastructure complexity, and superior end-user experiences. We are excited to partner with this exceptional team as they build and scale their application ingress platform.”

The team at ngrok has a history of success building software and scaling operations at globally renowned companies, including Twilio, Okta, Google, AWS, MongoDB, InfluxData, Instabase, Netscape, and more. Headquartered in San Francisco, ngrok tripled the size of its team over the past 12 months and is hiring across all business units.

“The initial positive feedback and widespread adoption of ngrok’s product is a prime example of how empowering developers can transform businesses,” said David Schneider, general partner at Coatue. “We are thrilled to support the ngrok team as they scale to accommodate the demand we see in the market for frictionless application ingress.”

Learn more about ngrok’s plans for innovation and growth on the company blog.

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