An open-source project quietly runs the networks of 1,200-plus organizations. It is also a Y Combinator startup out of Asheville betting that the plumbing of the cloud was overdue for an upgrade.
There is a specific kind of frustration that only shows up once you have wired together more than one cloud. The compute is elastic, the storage is infinite, the dashboards are gorgeous - and then you try to make a server in one region talk privately to a server in another, and you are suddenly editing config files by hand like it is 2009. Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns spent years at IBM staring at exactly this gap. In 2021 they quit and built the thing they wished existed. They called it Netmaker.
Netmaker is a virtual networking platform built on WireGuard, the lean, fast VPN protocol that now ships inside the Linux kernel. The pitch, stripped of jargon: you install a lightweight agent on your machines - servers, laptops, containers, a Raspberry Pi at the edge of a factory floor - and Netmaker knits them into one flat, encrypted network that behaves as if they were all sitting in the same room. The company's own shorthand for this is blunt and useful: a VPC for distributed systems.
Feiszli's background is the tell. Before Netmaker he led development teams at IBM building cloud-native and Kubernetes systems, after earlier stops at Deloitte and a Red Hat partner where he first met containers. He kept running into the same wall on client after client: the tooling for running software across many machines had raced ahead, but the tooling for connecting those machines had not. WireGuard, he decided, was the fast primitive worth betting on - it just needed automation wrapped around it.
Raw WireGuard is famously fast and famously spartan. It hands you a key exchange and an encrypted tunnel, then leaves the hard parts - who can talk to whom, how new machines join, what happens when one drops - as an exercise for the reader. Netmaker's job is to be that exercise, done for you. It handles peer discovery, access control, DNS, gateways, and failover, and puts an admin UI on top so a human can actually see the network they built.
The clearest fans are managed service providers. An MSP juggles dozens of customers, each needing its own secure, isolated network. Netmaker lets them run all of it from one account with the traffic cleanly segmented, which turns a recurring headache into a selling point. From there the use cases fan out: multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud teams stitching regions together, edge and IoT operators managing devices in the field, Kubernetes shops unifying bare metal and clusters across providers, and ordinary companies replacing clunky hardware VPNs with something remote workers can actually connect to.
Relative prominence across Netmaker's documented use cases. Illustrative.
Netmaker's structure follows the open-core script closely. The Community edition is free, Apache-2.0 licensed, and self-hostable - it is the version that racked up more than 11,000 stars on GitHub under the parent org, Gravitl. It ships mesh networking, egress gateways, relays, private DNS, access control lists, OAuth, and Kubernetes support out of the box. You can run your whole network on it and never pay a cent.
The money sits one tier up, in the features teams do not want to operate themselves. Professional, starting around $99 a month, adds role-based access control, single sign-on across multiple identity providers, built-in two-factor, metrics and monitoring, and automated failover. Enterprise layers on white-labeling, deeper customization, higher scale, and dedicated support. A separate Remote Access Client - desktop and mobile - lets non-engineers join a network without ever seeing a WireGuard config file.
Pricing per Netmaker's published tiers; figures approximate and subject to change.
Netmaker is not alone in the WireGuard-and-overlay lane. Tailscale is the best-known rival, also built on WireGuard; ZeroTier uses its own protocol; Nebula came out of Slack; Twingate and Cloudflare push zero-trust access from the enterprise side; and OpenVPN is the incumbent everyone is trying to retire. Netmaker's argument for itself is a short list: it leans on kernel WireGuard for raw speed, it can be fully self-hosted rather than living only in someone else's cloud, it ships a genuinely usable free tier, and its per-device pricing stays low as networks grow.
It is a big claim, and worth reading skeptically. But it is the kind of claim that comes with receipts: an open-source project people actually run, adoption that grew roughly 32% month over month through early 2022, and a spot in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch that turned the side project into a company with a balance sheet.
Netmaker is a lean operation - a handful of people, remote-first, headquartered near Asheville, North Carolina rather than the usual coastal hubs. Feiszli runs product and company as CEO; Carns, who he met at IBM, handles the technology as CTO. The two open-sourced the project in March 2021, before there was a company at all, and let usage tell them whether they had built something worth funding. It said yes.
The commercial launch came in October 2022, when Netmaker announced $2.3 million led by Lytical Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and SaxeCap, and introduced its Enterprise edition. Local press framed it, gamely, as a "superhighway for secure cloud networks." Since then the team has kept a steady release cadence - the v0.22 "Networking Redesigned" overhaul, IPv6 and dual-stack support, EMQX cloud integration, expanded identity providers - the unglamorous, load-bearing work that infrastructure demands.
The most interesting thing about Netmaker is how uninteresting it wants your network to be. No hand-edited configs, no mystery about which machine can reach which, no 2 a.m. debugging of a tunnel that silently died. It took a fast, minimal protocol and built the automation that makes it usable at scale, then gave most of it away to build trust before asking anyone to pay. Whether WireGuard really becomes the Kubernetes of networking is a bet still being settled. For the 1,200-plus organizations already running Netmaker, the more immediate question - can these machines just talk to each other - already has an answer.