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Tailscale has raised $160M

(tailscale.com)
655 points louis-paul | 2 comments | 08 Apr 25 10:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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elAhmo ◴[08 Apr 25 14:09 UTC] No.43621983[source]▶
When I saw the new round, I was instantly worried about change in direction that will most likely come with this, and effectively drive away regular users from a tool that seems universally loved.

Similar sentiment can be seen in the discussion from three years ago [1] when they raised $100M.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31259950

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pomatic ◴[08 Apr 25 17:38 UTC] No.43624385[source]▶
When they raised the 100M three years ago, I'm pretty sure they said they didn't need it and were saving it for a rainy day (or words to that effect), always seemed very odd at the time. Two q's for anyone who cares to speculate: have they burnt the original investment already? And if not, why would they need more funding? AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today, the only thing I can conceive is that they have a secret 'tailscale 2' project in the wings which is massively developer or capital intensive. Let's hope it is nothing related to AI band wagoning :-)
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1. kortilla ◴[09 Apr 25 07:05 UTC] No.43629560[source]▶
> AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today

What does this mean? They are competing with regular legacy VPNs for sure. Despite tailscale existing for the last 4 years, none of the large corporate clients even got closed to it. They were all on junk from Cisco, Palo Alto, to connect employees to corp net. A “cutting edge” one might use cloudflare warp.

You might be right that there isn’t much competition for pure distributed, but it turns out the market for that is actually quite small and it’s for people who can’t afford dedicated IPs or cloud instances.

Raising money here is a bad sign IMO unless it’s for a completely new product that requires servers at exchanges to eat CDNs like cloudflare’s lunch.

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2. PLG88 ◴[11 Apr 25 18:03 UTC] No.43656626[source]▶
Their is tons of competition depending on how you want to attack the problem. Tailscale's problem imho is that their product does not scale well as required by large enterprises. One could argue nor do traditional VPNs, but they are already in place and workking so that product config already works, no need for change. The market is massive, but you need to be at a high abstration layer in my opinion, so that you can replace far more than just the VPN.