Enterprise browser company Island may be the most valuable startup you’ve never heard of. The company, which is putting the browser at the center of security, announced a $175 million Series D investment on Tuesday at a whopping $3 billion valuation. Island It has now raised a total of $487 million.
That’s a lot of money and it makes us wonder: What is the company doing to warrant this type of investment at this level of value? Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia who invested in Island from the A round, says he was attracted to the company’s founding team and its unique value proposition.
“The two founders, one of whom was a technical founder from Israel, Dan Amiga, and another who was a senior US security executive, Mike Fey, had a vision that if a browser could be produced based in Chromium that looks like a standard browser for a corporate consumer employee, but if it were secure, it would stop bad guys from doing a lot of things,” Leone told TechCrunch.
He says the bottom line is that the overall cost of security can be reduced by replacing things like a VPN, data loss prevention, and mobile device management, all of which can be done right in the browser instead of purchasing tools. separated. This, in turn, could reduce the overall cost of protecting a network.
Island is defining a category with an enterprise browser, while allowing employees to work in a familiar environment and keeping them safer, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“They’re using the security angle to change human computing interactions,” he said. “Think of the browser as the screen for a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game and, based on all the data being captured, it can deliver contextually relevant content, actions and information, but it does so while offering class-leading security.” business for the user. data, process and identity.”
Fey acknowledges that if he went to a company with a proprietary browser and they had 20,000 apps (which would be possible at a Fortune 100 company), then they would have to test all of those apps with that browser. But the fact that Island is based on the Chromium standard means IT can trust the browser without having to put everything through a lengthy testing process. “The world of browsers standardized on Chromium. “This idea couldn’t have come to fruition before that,” Fey said.
Despite the value proposition and standardized approach, Fey says some explaining is still needed for executives to understand that by paying for a security-focused browser, they can actually save money in the long run. “You have to explain where the ROI is. [return on investment] comes from. What am I getting? Where does it come from? And the return on investment has to be very understandable, credible and great,” he stated.
How big? Consider that, according to him, one company saved $300 million a year by closing racks in a data center because they no longer needed nearly the same level of resources to run the same applications.
Fey says it’s not about replacing these tools, but rather the fact that leveraging a standardized browser makes it much easier to run things like web filtering or even virtual desktops. It sounds simple, but the company has 280 employees, of which 100 are engineers. He says a lot of engineering work went into making this happen.
While he declined to discuss specific revenue figures, the company has about 200 customers and has been growing steadily over the past few years. Leone called it exponential growth.
Fey believes Island can eventually become a major public company. “We’re doing decent ARR right now, meaningful ARR, and our margins are good,” she said. “So what we think is that one day we will be a strong IPO candidate, but not next year. Some day.”
