- Tailscale is a WireGuard based VPN service
- In April, The Company raised $3 Million in Seed Round
- Tailscale received another $12 Million from various new investors
In April this year, Tailscale, a Toronto, Canada-based corporate VPN company, raised $3m in a seed round.
The company has raised $12 million in a funding round. Accel is leading the round, with Heavybit and Uncork Capital participating.
Why is Wireguard better?
If you’ve been working remotely lately, you may have noticed that this traditional VPN setup doesn’t scale well. The gateway is a bottleneck and you can experience long loading times when there are a lot of people connected at the same time.
Going back to Tailscale, the startup is trying to modernize the corporate VPN. It starts with a different VPN protocol. Tailscale chose WireGuard, a lightweight VPN protocol that relies on a combination of public and private keys to establish an encrypted tunnel between two clients.
But Wireguard itself is just a protocol. It doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to handle public keys, add new devices to your network, etc. Tailscale acts as the glue that brings all the separate pieces together.
“Architecturally, I would describe Tailscale as the control plane and WireGuard is the data plane,” co-founder and CEO Avery Pennarun says.
How does Wireguard work?
All Tailscale clients check a coordination server to see if the connection is authorized. “It’s a dropbox for public keys,” Pennarun said. When somebody leaves the company, the public key is removed from the coordination server and Tailscale no longer works. Keys are rotated regularly for improved security.
A connection is then established between your laptop and the Git server or your laptop and the wiki server. There’s no bottleneck due to the VPN gateway as the Git server and the wiki server act as their own VPN gateways. There’s no need to expose your documentation wiki to the internet as employees first use Tailscale to access the server.
You don’t have to open the SSH port on the server as Tailscale can find a way to establish a connection through firewalls.
The company is still quite small but pretty efficient. With around 20 employees, Tailscale is generating tens of thousands of client installs per month.
You can get started for free with a single user and multiple devices.
