NordVPN Raises $100 Million in their First Ever Round of Funding

NordVPN Raises $100 Million in their First Ever Round of Funding

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is more or less a necessity now a days. Corporations use it for secure communications across the globe. Consumers, which include hackers, use VPN for their own reasons - good or bad. According to one report 30% traffic traverses through a VPN network. Many VPN's are even free to use with a limitation on data transferred each month or during a specified time. VPN providers also provide the ability to switch locations, by assigning an IP address from a different region. For Netflix users, this is one way to watch content from a different country, by pretending to be there. As we said, reasons to use VPN vary. According to some critics of free VPN providers, they do not handle user data responsibility and are a security risk.

Enter NordVPN, who have been around for almost a decade now, 2012 to be exact and has more than 100 patents to its name. They, like their competitors also offer free and paid services. During all this time, they have never gone to venture capitalists and in essence bootstrapped their growth. Currently, they boast around 15 million users and offer a host of services like NordPass, NordLocker and NordLayer, to name a few. Not only that, they have also acquired companies and recently merged with SurfShark.

This begs the question, why go the Venture Capital (VC) route? Before we answer that, it's good to know that NordVPN raised $100 Million, which could be considered late stage or Series A, depending on who you ask, at a valuation of $1.6 Billion, and is still classifies it as a startup. Now to answer the question of "Why raise capital?", then according to co-CEO and co-founder Eimantas Sabaliauskas, it's to progress their mission of open internet and more importantly to keep pace with the changing business landscape. 

The capital raised is intended to build out paying enterprise and consumer services with more oversight. This will help NordVPN address some bad press they have recently gotten in association with Russia misusing its services and also a breach in their data centers and not mention the lack of trust of their browser extension.

According to Sabaliauskas, “We have learned our lesson and come a long way since 2019,” he continues to state,  “Our mission is to build a radically different internet by securing consumer and enterprise accounts, and network information, against cyber threats around the world.”