Traditional SSL VPNs continue to dominate enterprise network security, burdening organisations with constant patching, large sales teams, and closed-source complexity. Berlin-based NetBird solves this as the only European open-source Zero Trust platform, emphasising product-led growth, community-driven development, and seamless user experience.
NetBird today announced a $10M Series A round led by Pace Capital, with participation from Nauta Capital, InReach Ventures, and Antler. This funding fuels its rise as a transparent alternative for global teams ditching legacy VPNs.
Making secure private networking a fundamental right for every company
Founded by Mikhail “Misha” Bragin (CEO) and Maycon Santos (CTO), NetBird is set to flip enterprise security on its head.
Bragin tells TFN, “We originally weren’t trying to start a company at all, it started as a personal side project in mid-2020/ We were building a privacy-first Dropbox alternative that you could run at home on a Raspberry Pi, and access from anywhere — basically something simple enough that even non-technical users could set it up.”
He continues, “To make the product work, they ended up building a peer-to-peer encrypted networking layer using WireGuard, dealing with NAT traversal, device discovery, and all the usual networking pain. That’s when it clicked: the real problem wasn’t storage, it was that secure networking is still unnecessarily hard, especially for modern teams.”
NetBird’s open-source Zero Trust platform overlays secure peer-to-peer connections on any network, eliminating gateways, ports, and complex configs. Key features include self-hosted deployment, low-friction setup, and organic growth via GitHub (launched in 2021), now connecting hundreds of thousands of users and machines worldwide.
As Bragin explains: “Enterprise network security has traditionally been gated behind long sales cycles and endless demos before teams can experience real value. We’ve changed that model. At NetBird, the code name for our GTM strategy is ‘Proof of Concept Starts at Home,’ meaning users can try the product for free with minimal friction and experience its value firsthand in their private homelabs before rolling it out to production. Our community has become our strongest advocate, shaping the product far more than any traditional enterprise marketing ever could.”
Unlike closed-source giants like Fortinet, Sophos, and SonicWall, NetBird focuses on transparency, community feedback, and European sovereignty.
What about diversity?
When we asked about diversity, Bragin shares, “We don’t publish formal diversity stats, but the team is genuinely very international, across a lot of countries and backgrounds. Both founders are immigrants to Germany”
What’s next?
This $10M will supercharge engineering and product teams to unlock new use cases, accelerate feature delivery, and support surging customer migrations.
Bragin concludes, “The goal is to become the number one solution for modern network security, and the default choice when companies want to move away from legacy VPNs. That means scaling adoption while keeping the product simple. It means investing heavily in reliability and performance. It also means building deeper integrations into the modern infrastructure stack, and continuing to grow the open source ecosystem and community around NetBird.”
