A Round Funding – Alan Shreve, ngrok

This is texturing TV. But the great pleasure of being joined by Alan Alan Shri is that they say your last name Mountain I did that right? That's right, Mitch.

Oh good. Good and Alan's with engrock. Welcome good to be having you on the show today.

Hey there Mitch. It's great to be here really excited to be on on the show. Well excited some great news about your funny announcement.

We'll get to that first tough folks about yourself and let us know a little bit about angry. Absolutely. My name is Alan Trev.

I'm the founder of ngrok you might know me as in contrivable on the internet, which is the the handle that I go by engrock is a API first Ingress as a service for developers. So we are solving the problem of application Ingress by really taking a different approach traditional application networking requires developers to tape together. A lot of Legacy Solutions things like, you know their own proxies or vpns or load balancers that they're taping together and then operating themselves and rock is building a solution that allows you to essentially like extract all those pieces into a service layer that we operate on your behalf.

So that that problem is out of your hair and then really allows developers to self-service and create that Ingress and programmatic. Dynamic way allowing their applications to really be independent to receive Ingress and become Ingress independent decoupled from the environment where the application is run. Take some of those problems out of the developer's hands at least, you know to solve all for themselves.

Yeah. Well first let's cover your funny announcement. You recently announced a series 8 tell us about it.

Yeah, it's a tremendously exciting milestone for the company. We raised 50 million dollars in in funding from Lightspeed and CO2. We're particularly excited that this is our very first fundraise for the company of any kind the entire company up until this point has been built in a fully customer-funded way where we build the business off of delivering real value to real customers.

So it's a real inflection and milestone for the business to walk on this new path. So another deck presented to the BC's and off you go you really got a product and market and some customers to show for it. That's great.

That's right engrock has you know, really grown to a tool and and piece of infrastructure that developers all around the world, you know trust and we built that you know adoption really on the strength of an amazing product and rock has a community of five million developers and we're signing up more than 4,000 every day who show up and are really excited to get their hands on the technology. And that's really one of the things that was really, you know strong for us as we went into to go raise this round. Was that kind of amazing traction with Developers?

A good friend of mine who's one of the best developers. I've worked with he said to me several times you can tell when a product was built by developers or developers not just developed like a security company might develop a product looks very different than now a developer would develop a product for themselves right would you is that relate to you? I would imagine given the name of your company on you.

Should I think that says it all That resonates really strongly, you know engrock got started because I am a software developer by trade and still still think of myself as one and you know, one of the problems that I had very early on in my career was getting Ingress to my developer to my laptop, right and I needed Ingress to build web consumers. Basically receiving those those inbound HTTP requests from the outside world is really challenging from a developer a development standpoint. So that was the initial Genesis of the product and once I you know build that original piece of it, which was an open source project and then launched the initial service there was really an outpouring of interest and excitement and support from the community about the solution.

That's one of those things that Rings true for developers is you know, when you solve a problem it often is one that many other developers are running into as well. So that was something that I saw in the very early days and you know, the Genesis event rock was really about hearing and feeling that outpouring of excitement and support and I was really kind of the initial reason that that benbrocka became a company and was founded was really on the strength of that Community excitement and feedback to to build build it into something much much bigger than it was. So that I'm curious about the challenge that you that you and the developer space and that kind of setting up this environment for themselves.

Is that the kind of time or energy or complexity you're doing that or is a also, you know, I have to go work with the security organization. They're not there aren't quite getting yet what I need and why I need it or how I need it or is it some of both? I would say it's not both creating Ingress is a really challenging problem.

And it's one that's bespoke to environments the way that I create Ingress for my applications right to receive traffic from the outside world is different based on whether I'm deploying application into AWS or into a functions as a service platform or to see I containers or just on my laptop or on my Raspberry Pi that I run at home. Right the solution that I need for each of them is very different. And so that's that's one piece.

That's really challenging. The other piece of challenging is that Ingress is a problem that requires multiple stakeholders infrastructure teams security teams and application developer teams all really need to align on the type of Ingress that's created and how it's configured and that kind of friction can slow down the delivery of applications. Especially if someone else is picking a technology or product that kind of Suits what they need or what they think the organization's need.

But now you have to implement it right? It wasn't really necessarily built for developers. But you know, I can work with that and obviously one way to get people to use things is make it easy for and make it feel like it's part of their development environment development cycle the tools that they use that's exactly right and rock strives to create tools that are one appealing to developers, but are also appealing to those other stakeholders right to the infrastructure teams and the security teams and that we are creating the interfaces that everyone expects and is excited about and really finds their usefulness and usually administers in rock once it's set up and developers built their applications to use it for Ingress is still the development teams more the platform team security team or is it just depend on the organization?

You would you would see a collaboration between those different stakeholders for administration of the account. But you have all the the right collaborators there, right? It's going to be The the policies that you will create around Ingress that can you know might be set up by the security team the actual like configurations or how to create Ingress might be set up by an infrastructure team and the actual usage of the product maybe set up by the developer teams, but you know, it really depends on the size of an organization in smaller organizations, you know developer organizations or developing teams, and they set up all of themselves.

Hmm, I would imagine two sort of compliance and validation of what is happening and having the data accessible to be able to track that or refine the policies that we said we're going to apply and are they in effect and having that automatically tracked for you? It's going to be a huge plus two developers not to worry about how do I build this into my logs? And how do I then get it out and get it to the people that want it?

Yeah, that's exactly right and rock is essentially like tracking those changes for you and recording those events of how how you're interested being updated over time. And then also on the compliance story, right and Brock has you know invested in the additional security certifications from a business standpoint to ensure that it's it's useful for your business. We have, you know, stock to compliance and and other things that you can find on our trust portal that should make your organization comfortable with using a product.

It's what every developer wants to work on and they're happy that you do it. They don't want to have to right. That's right, you know.

You know and rock is about our mission is about empowering developers to build and the more pieces right of that that we can you know, take care of for developers so that they can focus on building is really what gets us excited and really what gets me out of that in the morning. Fantastic, we'll talk about you know, 50 million dollars for your first round. That's you know, it's nothing to sneeze that that's a good chunk of change as they say, what are your plans for the use of those funds you've already created a product you're already engaging with customers and You know, what do you think would you plan to use that are already putting the money to good use for?

So we we raised this round to really meet the increasing demand for androc and our Ingress as a service platform with more than you can imagine with more than 4,000 developers signing up for it every day. That's a tremendous amount of adoption. And really we raise the funds to really scale the business to meet that demand beyond that.

We're all so, you know investing in a additional, you know new products new feature capabilities on top of the platform. We're listening to what developers want and what they're excited about and what the other stakeholders need out of a platform like this and a lot of that investment is going into creating those additional touchpoints additional features and the product to really deliver that like first class experience to everyone. Well in developers are about community and knowing that a company knows how to support developers right not just a lot of ticket.

We'll get back to you. Yeah, that's exactly right. Great.

Well, let's um, I'd love to talk about then, you know people that might go to your site check out the product and check out check out what they can do with it. What is some of the things that I'm a developer? What can I do with a demo account or trial account or something that they could engage with and see how angraq works and if it works for them?

Engrock has a free tier that developers can sign up for and get started to use for you know development use cases as well. As you know, like hobbyist kind of use cases and things that you're You're Building at home and really we pride ourselves on getting developers to that initial moment of value, you know, incredibly quickly there is essentially like a you download a piece of software and you run a single command on your command line and you'll be you'll be out to the races some initial things that you might really get excited about is once engrock has created Ingress to your service. It's really easy with just a few command line switches to then add, you know authentication you might want to add like Google authentication in front of your commands or to add observability by sending those traffic logs to another long destination or even something like creating initial resilience by adding like It breaking in front of your application with just a switch or turning on load balancing where you can essentially like.

Start up new instances of your program and the engrocket Ingress agent and you'll you'll initially begin load balancing without any real like setup or configuration. So that kind of like instant magic moments are really what we strive for and really reflects. Our mission to deliver value to developers as quickly as possible and allow them to get back to to building their applications.

Every night everything's about time to Value right make it easy. That's right. Exactly.

So talk about an API technology that you work with the matter. If I'm using rest or graphql or erpc here the specific Technologies web hooks, whatever might be that you're most accustomed to working with. Engrox supports all types of network traffic the ones with the most application Level Primitives that we we have at the moment are around all kinds of HTTP traffic so that may be traffic for apis, but it may also be traffic for you know, traditional web applications that are you know browser facing types of apps that includes web of consumers as well.

But even if you're using other types of your creating Ingress for other types of services, like databases or RDP or SSH other kinds of like Network protocols and rock has additional capabilities that allow you to create invest for those types of services as well. Problem. So anything this http-based or can be done over that kind of a protocols that am I getting that right?

Really anything that runs on top of TCP is something that that ngrok can assist you with most of our application Level Primitives are oriented towards HTTP application. So Okay, good good. But is there any particular applications you mentioned like database and some things like that.

Are there any types of applications or environments that your best suited for or is a more kind of general purpose anything this TCP IP and you could you know begin to work with your technology. And rock is an interest platform and part of building platforms is making sure that they are general purpose and can be you know adapted and suited to any application that you're working with. So I'd really say that ngrok is you know generic in that way and that you can adapt it to you know, the type of application that you're working with that being said, I would say that http-based applications apis and web apps are the ones that you'll find.

The platform is most suited to at the moment. Hmm and very prolific at that so I'm very common technology great. But where do folks go to to check things out good the tires a kick or pick things for a spin.

com downloading, you know, a small piece of software and signing up for a free account. Also, you know, whatever, you know ecosystem or a platform your your working in and rock typically has really easy commands to install it using package managers like homebrewer app or the like That business that have never tried to cry again, but very quickly see right on the front page is built for developers pretty straightforward. Very cool talk a little bit more about this support too because I know how important that is for developers, which are approach for that.

Can you clarify that a little bit for you? I didn't engage with people that are using your technology is a primarily you know over a community-based tool. Do you do it on the site?

Do you use some existing? You don't do it on Reddit? I assume it's just picking up search example, but how do you connect with people and support that many using your technology?

Yeah, if you want to get involved in the community and come chat with us, we have an open and public slack Channel that's on our website really easy to just come and join and have access and talk to to us and other members of the community who are Building Solutions on top. Thanks. Fantastic.

Well, congratulations again on the funding ground and the success that you had today. Look forward to more great things from Bangor. Mitch thanks so much for for having me on the show.

It's it's been a pleasure and a great sharing and Rockwood with you and your audience. You look forward to having you back. Looking forward to it.