UPDATED 09:00 EDT / MARCH 23 2022

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‘Enterprise Browser’ maker Island raises $115M at $1.3B valuation

Island, the developer of the security-focused “Enterprise Browser,” reached unicorn status today with a $115 million funding round led by Insight Partners, bringing its valuation to $1.3 billion.

This Series B round saw participation from Island’s existing investors Stripes and Sequoia Capital. To date, the startup has raised more than $200 million in total funds.

“Island is ushering in a whole new chapter for enterprise work,” said Mike Fey, Island’s co-founder and chief executive. “The Enterprise Browser fundamentally reimagines the enterprise work environment, enabling organizations to achieve entirely new levels of security, productivity and IT efficiency.”

Island’s product, which it calls the Enterprise Browser, provides needed web browser security for enterprise information technology teams while also giving users familiar interfaces. By embedding security and tooling directly into the browser itself, IT teams get last-mile security built-in and can control everything about the end-user experience even remotely by making the browser part of the internal network every step of the way.

Using the Island Enterprise Browser, security teams can control everything from basic data protection such as copy, paste, download, upload and screenshot capture, or even more advanced elements such as multifactor authentication. All that is instrumented on the back end via a dashboard from the IT perspective for entire fleets of browsers, which means that each organization and subgroup can control its own needs independently, or set special rules for employees and contractors.

“When we set out to build the Enterprise Browser, we aimed to deliver tremendous value to security professionals from day one,” said Dan Amiga, Island’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “But what we’re noticing now is the huge opportunity to solve previously insurmountable problems not only in the security space but across productivity and IT as well.”

Island came out of stealth mode in early February with $100 million in early-stage funding and a team of more than 100 employees. Fey told SiliconANGLE that the company plans to have at least 200 employees by the end of the year, with 75% working in research and development.

Fey explained that internally its development teams are also called “islands” and that their individual tasks were to design new functionalities for the Island browser based on customer interests.

“We just got off a call recently and a customer went over all the use cases but asked, ‘Have you ever thought about doing this?’ and I said, ‘That’s brilliant,’ so we spun up a new island, a development team, and then they go off and build that feature set,” Fey said. “The beautiful thing is that the platform upon which we build development teams are totally independent and they don’t intersect, so we don’t wait for any single group to finish. We have features coming into the browser almost daily now.”

Fey said that he believes there’s no limit to the kind of features that can be added to the browser. Island will be using the new funds to invest in more security and greater productivity for the users. When the product development began it was about “last mile control,” such as preventing data leaks and maintaining control over the edge system, but now Island is looking to expand into web filtering and cloud solutions as well.

Image: Island

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