I’m thrilled to share that NS1 has raised a $40M Series D financing round as fuel to accelerate product development and innovation. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners with participation from NS1’s existing major investors, and represents a significant increase in value for NS1, just 9 months after we closed our Series C from Dell Technologies Capital and Cisco Investments. With this financing we have raised more than $125M to build the next generation of DNS, DHCP, IP Address Management (IPAM), and Traffic Steering technologies and grow our incredible base of 600+ enterprise customers. Read the press release for full details of our Series D financing.
NS1 is powering society’s high speed transformation
We are all experiencing a shock to the way we live, work, and engage with each other. The rapid shifts in our lives over the last few months as the pandemic has unfolded have driven society increasingly online, pushed businesses to compress transformation timelines, and accelerated trends that show no signs of reversing even post pandemic: more cloud, more digital, more applications, more and more of our lives driven by the Internet and networks.
At NS1, we’ve existed right at the foundations of these trends from the beginning of our business - and in the last few months, we’ve been at the core of our customers’ strategies for adapting to the new reality. We power the applications, infrastructure, and networks of the technologies powering our new world. The modern “work from home” stack, the entertainment and news media we’re consuming online, the telehealth resources so many depend on, the tools our children are using for remote education, not to mention the software and systems that make up the building blocks of modern businesses - NS1 provides elastic, resilient traffic and networking technologies that underlie the rapid innovation happening today in all these areas, and many more.
In late March, I spoke with an NS1 customer - a leader at a $100B+ software company - who told me network performance was the #2 KPI for her company’s coronavirus task force, second only to the number of employees infected by the virus. Why? First, because the entire organization had moved online. Could the teams work effectively with each other from home? Could the company continue making productive forward progress toward its initiatives? And second, because the customers of all the company’s products and services were now interacting differently with their applications. Could customers continue to have great experiences, without breaking the bank or losing ground on security? In today’s digitally connected world, productivity, customer experience, operational efficiency, and security are all about the networking foundations, and NS1 unlocks incredible leverage for our customers in those foundations.
The world isn’t going back. It’s more critical than ever that we invest in modernizing foundational technologies like DNS, DDI, and Traffic Steering that underpin the applications driving society forward. I’m thrilled that with this Series D, we’ll be able to accelerate NS1’s innovation even more aggressively so we can continue moving the market forward and helping our customers unleash the leverage of these pervasive technologies.
Compounding market momentum and phenomenal execution
NS1 already leads in the DNS, DDI, and Traffic Steering markets with next generation solutions, powered by a software defined, cloud native approach that has leapfrogged legacy incumbents who lack software and cloud DNA. In recent years, our competitors have scaled back on innovation, and in some cases wound down their businesses or gone up for sale. At the same time, we’ve doubled and tripled down and that’s what we’re doing once again with our Series D. There is a tremendous market opportunity to unlock incredible leverage at the foundations of the network to drive great user experiences, unlock huge operational efficiencies, and secure the technologies upon which we all depend.
Through the last several months, NS1’s team has leaned in. We’ve moved our own operations fully online literally overnight. We’ve held our first ever virtual conference, INS1GHTS2020, with tremendous results. We’ve gone live on Cisco’s GPL to widen our reach across the Cisco ecosystem. We’ve brought new product capabilities to market, like our Advanced VPN Traffic Management, to help our customers react effectively to new needs driven by the pandemic. We’ve won dozens of new customers, helped all our customers scale, streamline, and orchestrate their applications and traffic for shifting conditions, and continued our track record of industry leading customer and revenue retention.
Now, with this Series D financing, we’re scaling up our product development and innovation efforts dramatically. While we’ve led the industry in innovation for many years, there’s still so much more to do, and so many unique opportunities that only NS1’s software defined approach can address.
Our team is growing faster than ever
We are hiring, especially in our product development teams. If you’re looking to join a diverse, highly engaged and fast moving team where everyone is enabled to do the best work of their careers - if you’re looking to have a big impact on the Internet and the way applications are built and delivered - if you’re looking to help build an enduring company and technologies that are at the foundations powering modern society - visit our Careers page and consider joining us on our journey!