# ngrok

> ngrok is developer infrastructure that puts any app, API, or AI model online with a single command. What began in 2013 as one engineer's weekend project to learn Go is now a unified ingress platform - reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway, and global load balancer rolled into one - used by more than 5 million developers and trusted by companies like GitHub, Twilio, Zoom, and HashiCorp.

- **Founded:** 2013
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Alan Shreve (Founder & CEO)
- **Team size:** ~83 employees
- **Products:** Secure Tunnels, API Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress / ngrok Operator, AI Gateway, ngrok-go / ngrok-rs SDKs
- **Notable:** Grew from zero to 5 million developers entirely bootstrapped over seven years, Raised a $50M Series A in 2022 led by Lightspeed with Coatue - the company's first outside funding, Reached 30,000+ paying customers before taking any venture capital

## Products & services

- **Secure Tunnels** — The original ngrok: a single command exposes a local server to the public internet over a secure tunnel - ideal for testing webhooks, sharing demos, and previewing apps.
- **API Gateway** — A developer-defined API gateway that applies policies, transformations, authentication, and rate limiting at the edge before traffic reaches backends.
- **Kubernetes Ingress / ngrok Operator** — An operator that turns standard Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API resources into ngrok endpoints and policies, delivering traffic to pods across clusters.
- **AI Gateway** — Routes AI requests to any provider through a single endpoint with automatic failover, key rotation, and selection strategies - with native support for Anthropic's SDK features like prompt caching and extended thinking.
- **ngrok-go / ngrok-rs SDKs** — Native libraries that embed secure ingress directly into Go and Rust applications, packaging the ngrok agent as code.
- **Identity-Aware Proxy & Traffic Inspector** — OIDC/SAML-based access controls plus a cloud traffic inspector - a modern PCAP-in-the-cloud for endpoint observability.

## Achievements

- Grew from zero to 5 million developers entirely bootstrapped over seven years
- Raised a $50M Series A in 2022 led by Lightspeed with Coatue - the company's first outside funding
- Reached 30,000+ paying customers before taking any venture capital
- Launched the industry's first developer-defined API gateway in 2024
- Completed SOC 2 Type 2 testing with no findings
- Adopted by GitHub, Twilio, Zoom, and HashiCorp as an ingress and integration partner

## Latest updates

- **2025-12** — AI Gateway adds native support for Anthropic's SDK, enabling Claude-only features such as prompt caching and extended thinking, plus multi-provider routing with failover and key rotation.
- **2025-06** — Shipped ngrok-go and ngrok-rs libraries for embedding ingress directly into Go and Rust apps, and introduced a cloud network traffic inspector.
- **2024-02** — Announced the industry's first developer-defined API gateway, unifying ingress, policy, and security at the edge.
- **2022-12** — Raised $50M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Coatue - the company's first fundraise after seven bootstrapped years.

## Links

- Website: https://ngrok.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ngrok
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ngrokHQ
- GitHub: https://github.com/ngrok
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ngrokHQ

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ngrok
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-20