Twingate: Turning the Zero Trust Fantasy Into Reality

At WndrCo, we believe that cybersecurity will be the largest technology market in the world. As our personal and professional lives move to the cloud, every person, company, and government will rethink everything they do in order to protect themselves.

Over the past four years, we invested about half of our first fund - and even more of our time - in cybersecurity. We partnered with world class founders to create emerging cybersecurity leaders like Aura, Pango, and VPN Super, while also making seed or Series A investments in 1Password, Material Security, ThreatOptix, and more.

How we work has changed forever, and along with that we’ve seen a cambrian explosion of Future of Work software. Employees meet on Zoom, share files via Dropbox, design new products with Figma, manage cross functional projects in Airtable, collaborate on data with Databricks, and so on. 

The only thing matching the innovation in how we work has been the pace and creativity of cyberattacks … phishing and social engineering, ransomware, lateral movement after breaking in via compromised entry points, and much more.

The solution to this problem seemed to be in the mythical land of Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a security architecture designed for a world where employees work from everywhere, and where resources reside anywhere. Researchers at Google had described it clearly in a 2014 white paper, “BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security.” The problem is that no one outside of Google had actually seen it. 

In 2019, while Zero Trust was being abused as a marketing buzzword (as often happens in enterprise tech), we saw an opportunity to build a platform that was Zero Trust by design, from the ground up. A product that’s dead simple to deploy, almost invisible to use, and programmable/customizable to unlock layers of functionality over time. 

We started with an unfair advantage: we incubated Twingate with remarkable founders with whom we had worked closely for years, Tony Huie, Alex Marshall, and Lior Rozner. All of them are technical enough to solve hard problems while being passionate enough about product to build things loved by users. Combined with their incredible tenacity and will to win, we believe they are unstoppable. 

From the beginning, Twingate embraced the approach of empowering IT and developers to “try before you buy,” with many of their customers getting pilot deployments up and running in 15 minutes before upselling to a full company-wide deployment weeks later.

Since our launch less than 18 months ago, Twingate’s growth and customer love has been thrilling. We have hundreds of happy customers with tens of thousands of active users, the highest category rating on G2, and an amazing team. Today, we’re also excited to welcome our friend Jay Simons and BOND who led Twingate’s $42M Series B financing, alongside our existing co-investors 8VC and SignalFire.