Secure web gateways, network security services designed to help organizations enforce IT policies around Internet use by blocking (or letting through) certain traffic, are one of the most common investments organizations make in their cybersecurity profiles. But this is a product that's been around for decades, which means there's still plenty of room for innovation and improvement.
A SWG startup called dope.security has said it has raised $16 million to boost its efforts to do just that.
Instead of being routed through the cloud and data centers or large and expensive local network devices (some of the most popular approaches for these types of services today), Dope has designed a secure web gateway product that runs on organizations' endpoints: computers and other devices connected to the company network. Dope believes that this approach makes it easier to use, more secure, less prone to failures, much faster, and more respectful of users' privacy.
Dope plans to use the funding to hire staff, build the business, and continue to improve its product with more features. Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Dope, said in an interview from his headquarters in Mountain View, California that new features will include a Dope API by the end of the year and a "zero trust" layer for organizations. that need an extra level of security.
The Series A round has been led by GV (Google Ventures), and Boldstart Ventures and Preface have also participated in it, which backed the startup last year when it was still in secrecy. The company has raised $20 million. He has not disclosed his valuation.
Agarwal explained that he came up with the central premise of Dope while working at Symantec, where he started as an engineer working on SWG and rose to product manager and eventually general manager. Symantec is one of the world's best-known providers of secure web gateways and other security products, so Agarwal was a first-hand witness to the time it took for Symantec to make changes to the product and the issues with how it currently works.
"I lived SWG day after day," he said. "I've heard customers complain that when it's not working properly, you don't have web access at all."
In his opinion, as computing has moved to the cloud, moving security to the cloud to manage that change has been a mistake. Typical secure web gateway products built to work in the cloud essentially send all of their traffic to servers before letting it through or blocking it. This essentially causes delays and can even lead to a complete failure when something is wrong.. The problem has been exacerbated by increased traffic moving to the cloud and the increased number of people working from disparate locations.
Dope describes his approach as "flying through": The endpoint is where traffic is evaluated before being allowed through (or not, as the case may be). ANDReduced hop not only means less time in transit, but also lessens the chances of the entire system going down.
Dope uses the cloud, but only for certain aspects of the service. Administrators manage black and white lists in the cloud, and that data is distributed to endpoints following guidelines from Dope itself, which claims to be analyzing some 700 terabytes of content to understand threats on the Internet. Diagnostics and analytics are then sent to the cloud so network administrators can better understand usage and behavior on their networks.
This points to another important aspect of this and all secure web gateway products: The foundation of these services is that they are there to control how people connect to the Internet, monitor what they do, and see how (and what) data can come in. or leave a network.
But in the bigger picture of a market that was worth $9.000 billion at the end of 2022 and is projected to grow to nearly $24.000 billion by 2028, it's clear that this is only going to grow as one focus in the fight to deal to protect organizations against ever-increasing cybersecurity threats. Dope believes that it is offering a route to manage that containment in a way that is potentially less intrusive and more user-friendly than the other options out there.
“dope.security cares deeply about design and user experience in a way that is unique in the security industry. Their first goal when creating a product is simplicity: simplicity to architecture, purchase, deployment and management," Sangeen Zeb, general partner at GV, said in a statement. “dope.security is well positioned to reinvent traditional SWG approaches, and we are excited to work with the team to bring this modern approach to life.” Zeb joins the startup board with this round.
El price of service starts at $60 per device per year.
