YesPress Dispatch · Developer Infrastructure
ngrok.
The tunnel that grew up. Developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to your apps, APIs, and AI models.
$ ngrok http 3000 → you're on the internet
The tunnel that grew up. Developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to your apps, APIs, and AI models.
Most infrastructure companies start with a pitch deck. ngrok started with a developer who wanted to learn a language.
In 2013, Alan Shreve was an engineer at Twilio with an itch to learn Go. The exercise needed a problem, and he picked an unglamorous one that quietly annoys every developer alive: getting a program running on your laptop to be reachable from the public internet. Webhooks, demos, a quick preview for a teammate - all of it normally means wrestling with firewalls, NAT, and DNS. Shreve wrote a tool that made the wrestling disappear. Type one command, and your localhost has a public address.
He called it ngrok - a nod to the Unix ngrep tool and the idea of tunneling traffic through a rock in the network. He put it online on a credit card, paying around $20 a month for a server. The instance paid for itself almost immediately. There was no growth team, no paid acquisition, no investor calls. There were developers telling other developers, which is the only marketing that has ever worked in this corner of software.
That word of mouth did something unusual. For seven years, ngrok grew entirely on customer revenue - from zero to five million users - while remaining a company small enough to fit in a conversation. By the time Shreve raised money, more than 30,000 customers were already paying. The fundraise wasn't to find product-market fit. It was to keep up with it.
ngrok is developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to your apps, APIs, and AI models.
ngrok collapses the messy stack of getting traffic to an app - reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway, global load balancer - into a single programmable platform.
The original magic: expose a local server to the internet with one command. Test webhooks, share demos, preview apps - no deploy required.
A developer-defined gateway that applies auth, policies, transformations, and rate limits at the edge before traffic ever reaches your backend.
The ngrok Operator turns standard Ingress and Gateway API resources into live endpoints and policies, routing traffic to pods across clusters.
Route AI requests to any provider through one endpoint, with failover and key rotation - and native support for Anthropic's SDK features.
Native libraries that embed secure ingress directly into Go and Rust apps. The tunnel stops being a process and becomes a line of code.
OIDC/SAML identity-aware proxy plus a cloud traffic inspector - a modern PCAP in the cloud for every endpoint you run.
A rough sketch of the climb from a $20 server to five million developers. Figures are approximate, drawn from public statements.
Alan Shreve releases ngrok as an open-source project while at Twilio - built to learn Go.
Grows to 5M users and 30K+ paying customers on customer revenue alone.
$50M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Coatue.
Launches what it calls the industry's first developer-defined API gateway.
AI Gateway gains native Anthropic SDK support; ngrok-go and ngrok-rs ship.
Known online as inconshreveable - a pun on his own surname - Shreve built ngrok to learn Go and discovered a business hiding inside the exercise. He ran it lean and profitable for the better part of a decade before raising a dollar.
The entire company started on a credit card and a single small server instance.
ngrok was the byproduct of learning Go - the tool, not the goal.
The founder's longtime handle, a pun stitched together from his surname.
Tens of thousands of paying customers years before any investor wrote a check.
The name nods to a Unix tool and the idea of tunneling through a rock in the network.
Passed SOC 2 Type 2 testing clean - the hobby tool grew up.
Demos, interviews, and the official channels.