NetFoundry

NetFoundry built and maintains OpenZiti, an open-source, Apache-licensed zero-trust networking framework, then sells a managed control plane (CloudZiti) and enterprise support on top of it. The underlying idea is to embed zero-trust, identity-based access directly into applications and workloads at the code or configuration level — outbound-only, mutually-authenticated connections — rather than bolting on zero trust through an appliance, agent, or gateway sitting in front of the network. In practice that means no open inbound ports, no traditional site-to-site VPN, and no firewall rule changes to expose an application securely.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, NetFoundry ran self-funded for years before raising a $12 million Series A led by SYN Ventures in April 2025, layered on top of more than $50 million in prior strategic investment. The company says OpenZiti now carries over 1 billion sessions per month in production, and cites customers including Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Blackstone, and eight of the top ten U.S. banks — notable given how conservative large banks tend to be about adopting infrastructure from a roughly 60-person vendor, though the specific figure of "eight of the top ten" is a company claim not independently verified here.

NetFoundry’s open-source-first go-to-market is the real differentiator versus commercial ZTNA vendors like Zscaler and Cloudflare: because OpenZiti itself is free and developed in the open, NetFoundry competes on the value of its hosted control plane and support rather than gatekeeping the core technology, which has helped OpenZiti get embedded directly into developer tooling and AI-workload environments where NetFoundry has recently extended it with a zero-trust enclave for AI infrastructure.