Dope Safety emerges from stealth to shake up the SWG market • TechCrunch

San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Dope Safety has launched from stealth with $4 million in funding to modernize the safe internet gateway market.

A safe internet gateway, or SWG, is a community safety machine that acts as a barrier between customers and malicious internet site visitors, web sites with vulnerabilities, malware, and different internet-based cyber threats. Whereas not at all attractive, SWGs have change into important in the course of the latest shift to distant and hybrid work as workers shift from a tightly-controlled workplace surroundings to much less safe house networks.

Although SWGs are an vital device for organizations whose staff not sit inside an inside company community, Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Dope Safety, says that almost all legacy SWGs are not match for function in a distant, cloud-first world.

“There’s been an emergence of safe internet entry and at present each main group protects or secures what you possibly can entry out of your laptop computer,” Agarwal tells TechCrunch. “The way in which during which they do this can be a downside. It’s the equal of taking a flight from London to Dublin, and stopping over in Germany.”

These stopovers, together with difficult-to-deploy options, result in outages, off-device decryption, considerably slower web page hundreds, and lowered end-user productiveness, he added.

Agarwal, a cybersecurity veteran who began hacking as a toddler, grew to become annoyed with legacy SWG options throughout his time at Forcepoint and Symantec, the place he spent years attempting to retrofit present SWG options to unravel issues that he says had been by no means designed to unravel. “I began to see all of those prospects complain about outages, reliability, and efficiency issues,” Agarwal mentioned.

It was this that led to the creation of Dope Safety, a startup named after the Bay Space slang. Dope Safety is a fly-direct SWG that eliminates the info heart stopover structure required by legacy suppliers, as a substitute performing safety instantly on the endpoint. This structure improves efficiency as much as fourfold, in keeping with Agarwal, and ensures privateness and reliability when securing enterprises in opposition to web-based threats.

Agarwal mentioned his firm’s know-how will be deployed in below 5 minutes and gives community defenders insights by way of a cloud-based console, and integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google accounts — and is already within the palms of consumers.

The corporate’s $4 million funding was led by Boldstart Ventures. Agarwal mentioned the corporate has 30 workers, largely former Forcepoint and Symantec workers — is already on the lookout for the promote it’s going to attempt to disrupt subsequent.

“We wish to construct collectively not one product, however a complete product portfolio,” Agarwal mentioned. “And we wish prospects to have a look at these merchandise and say ‘yeah, that’s dope’.”