Berlin’s NetBird Secures €8.5 Million Funding In Series A Round

The round was led by Pace Capital, with participation from Nauta Capital, InReach Ventures, and Antler.

Tina He, who led the investment at Pace Capital, commented: “Security infrastructure needs to be open, composable and built for how modern organisations actually operate. NetBird is exactly the kind of foundational layer we look for: technically excellent and loved by the technical community. What impressed us most was the quality of adoption. Teams started small and quickly replaced their entire corporate VPN stack.”

Founded in 2021 by Misha Bragin and Maycon Santos, NetBird develops an open-source Zero Trust network security platform. Combining a WireGuard-based overlay network with Zero Trust Network Access, it offers a unified, secure connectivity solution.

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NetBird focuses on simplicity, eliminating complex VPN gateways, firewall setups and centralised configurations. Its software-defined networking connects resources securely without single points of failure.

The company relies on organic adoption rather than traditional sales or heavy marketing, leveraging its open-source transparency, self-hosted options and support from community creators and IT influencers to turn users into advocates.

“NetBird realised that the true decision-makers in modern corporate environments aren’t just executives, they’re the network engineers, DevOps teams, and security practitioners who love to tinker, test, and hack in their own homelabs. They discovered this through the early adoption patterns of their community: long before NetBird reached procurement desks, it was being installed, benchmarked and stress-tested at home by the very engineers who later championed it inside their organisations,” mentioned the company.

Misha Bragin CEO and co-founder of NetBird, said, “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 that users can try the product for free with minimal friction and experience its value first-hand 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.”

The new funding will enable NetBird to scale its platform, grow its engineering and product teams, and assist customers in migrating from traditional SSL VPN and firewall solutions.

“We’re already winning deals and migrating customers away from traditional SSL VPN products like Sophos, SonicWall or Fortinet. This funding helps us do it at an even larger scale,” said Maycon Santos, co-founder and CTO, NetBird.

NetBird emphasizes European sovereignty, positioning itself as a European alternative for modern remote access and network security, offering infrastructure developed locally rather than relying on large US vendors.

In 2024, the company raised €4 million in a Seed round co-led by InReach Ventures and Nauta Capital. Its platform is now adopted across industries and regions, serving managed service providers, high-growth startups, global enterprises, and major European government organizations. Customers include Sport Alliance, netgo, Signicat and VIEW Group.

About NetBird

NetBird is an open-source VPN platform based on WireGuard®, enabling secure private networks for organizations or homes with zero configuration. It eliminates the complexity of ports, VPN gateways, and firewall rules, providing a simple, seamless and reliable Zero Trust networking solution.