Dope Security lands $16 million in funding for secure web gateway

Dope Security has closed a $16M series A funding round led by Google Ventures (GV), with participation from existing investors boldstart ventures and Preface.

The company will use the funding to accelerate the adoption of the industry’s first fly-direct SWG, introducing improved performance, privacy, and reliability to the cybersecurity space all at the click of a button.

The funding brings Dope Security’s total amount raised to $20M. Sangeen Zeb, General Partner at Google Ventures (GV), will join its Board of Directors.

Powered by its dope.SWG, Dope Security disrupts the multi-billion dollar SWG market by performing security directly on the endpoint instead of routing traffic through stopover data centers. This streamlined approach improves performance up to 4X, ensures that decrypted data never leaves the device, and improves reliability by eliminating external dependencies. Designed with an elegant, simplistic user experience, the dope.swg can be trialed with a simple visit to the Dope Security website and installs in under five minutes.

“I learned the hard way that legacy SWG architecture wasn’t designed for the modern workforce. Yesterday’s approach doesn’t solve today’s problems,” said Kunal Agarwal, CEO at Dope Security. “Nothing about a legacy SWG works for today. They’re inefficient, unreliable, and incredibly hard to deploy – let alone actually learn to use. The industry needs a new, efficient architecture designed for today with a user experience that puts the customer first. We’re excited to bring the first fly-direct SWG architecture to market with the dope.swg.”

For decades, SWG providers secured office environments with on-site hardware. As organizations transitioned to distributed workforces and cloud environments, SWG providers began introducing cloud-hosted proxies that route traffic through stopover data centers for every connection. This leads to problems with outages, off-device decryption, significantly slower page loads, and reduced end-user productivity.

“Dope Security completely changed the game for us,” said David Cook, CISO at Sequoia Consulting, and former CISO at Databricks. “Using dope.swg to upgrade endpoint security is remarkably easy, and moving from initial trial to full deployment was quick and self-service. Now, the Internet runs as designed and our team can spend time innovating, rather than trying to make a legacy SWG work.”

The dope.swg lives on the endpoint, performing security checks on-device and never taking sensitive decrypted data offsite. The platform is designed with intuitive workflows and a simplistic user experience, delivering:

• Fly-direct, and Fly Privately: Enforce endpoint-driven security controls including URL categorization, SSL inspection, Anti-Malware, Cloud Application Controls (CAC), and custom user-based policies – no stopover required.
• Analytics and Visibility: Visualize data and gather end-user insights through a cloud-native console, including Productivity, Policy, and Shadow IT analyses, along with the ability to debug and run diagnostics remotely.
• Seamless Deployment: Get started in under five minutes with the easy-to-try, easy-to-deploy dope.swg.
• Instant Zero-Trust Policies: Synchronize with Office 365 and Google for single sign-on and user imports enabling zero-trust policies.

“Dope Security cares deeply about design and user experience in a way that is unique to the security industry. Its first goal when creating a product is simplicity – the simplicity of architecture, purchasing, deployment, and management,” said Sangeen Zeb, General Partner, GV. “Dope Security is well-positioned to reinvent traditional approaches to SWG, and we’re excited to work with the team to bring this modern approach to life.”