The NS1 founders (left to right – Alex, Kris and Jon) – photo credit Saskia Uppencamp
Congratulations NS1 on raising a $20M Series B1 round led by GGV Capital. My partners and I are ecstatic to be backing NS1, and I’m delighted to have joined the NS1 board. At GGV, we’re constantly hunting for exceptional founders who know their space better than anyone else and whose instincts keep them several steps ahead. We get very excited when these founders are attacking large markets that are rapidly changing, providing opportunity to startups. We’ve found all of this and more in NS1. In particular, our investment rests on three fundamental themes:
Team. NS1’s founding team, led by CEO Kris Beevers, is hands down the most knowledgable, respected and sought after team in the DNS and traffic management area. Kris and his co-founders Jon Sullivan and Alex Vayl cut their teeth at Voxel, a hosting provider than sold to Internap in ’11. The team set out to re-invent DNS with the founding of NS1, and nearly all of the many handfuls of NS1 customers with whom we’ve spoken mention Kris’ vision and the tremendous reliability and quality of NS1’s authoritative DNS offerings as prime reasons for their delight with NS1. As we’ve seen at successful GGV companies such as Square, Alibaba, Successfactors, Isilon, Nimble Storage and HashiCorp, exceptional founders can re-define markets and propel their companies to become clear leaders. Kris and his team are in process of doing this at NS1.
Market. Modern application architectures are shifting rapidly. Cloud, continuous delivery, DevOps and micro-services are all inexorable and interdependent trends. Today’s applications frequently live across multiple timezones, networks and data centers and depend upon internal and network-based content delivery. NS1’s software is purpose built for this new world, re-imagining DNS and traffic management to address the many needs of modern applications. NS1 delivers top tier performance, reliability and integration to their customers’ orchestration, all the while defending domains against attack with unparalleled proficiency. A growing number of web scale, global mobile apps and enterprises are recognizing the need to upgrade their DNS and traffic management approach, and NS1 is the obvious choice.
Momentum. Given its growing list of brand name happy customers and the rapidly changing dynamics in the market, NS1 is scaling as fast as any cloud company we’ve seen, tripling year over year for the past several years. The company is taking share and also benefiting from meaningful market growth as modern application architectures are causing companies to rethink DNS. As a result, we expect NS1 to continue to grow very rapidly for the foreseeable future, and customers should also remain extremely happy, driven both by the commitment of the team and by the strength of the technology.
We look forward to a very bright future for NS1 working with Kris and team. The company has an exciting vision and we’re excited to be on the rocket ship!