Island, the enterprise browser firm, would be the most useful startup that you’ve by no means heard of. The corporate, which is placing the browser on the middle of safety, introduced a $175 million Sequence D funding on Tuesday at a whopping $3 billion valuation. Island has now raised a complete of $487 million.

That’s a ton of cash, and it makes us surprise: What’s the firm doing to warrant this sort of funding at this degree of worth? Doug Leone, a accomplice at Sequoia who invested in Island going again to the A spherical, says that he was interested in the corporate’s founding staff and distinctive worth proposition.

“The 2 founders, certainly one of whom was a technical founder out of Israel — Dan Amiga — and one who was a really senior safety government out of the U.S. — Mike Fey — had a imaginative and prescient that if you happen to might produce a browser based mostly on Chromium that appears like a regular browser to the patron worker in an organization, however was safe, it will cease unhealthy guys from doing an entire bunch of issues,” Leone informed TechCrunch.

He says that the tip result’s that you could decrease the general price of safety by changing issues like a VPN, information loss prevention and cell system administration, all of which will be carried out proper within the browser as a substitute of buying separate instruments. That might in flip decrease the general price of securing a community.

Island is defining a class with an enterprise browser, whereas permitting workers to work in a well-known surroundings and protecting them safer, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Analysis.

“They’re utilizing the safety angle to vary human computing interactions,” he stated. “Consider the browser as your display right into a ‘Select Your Personal Journey’ sport, and based mostly on all the info being captured, it may possibly ship contextually related content material, actions and perception, however it does it whereas delivering on enterprise class safety of the info, course of and id.”

Fey acknowledges that if he confirmed up at an organization with a proprietary browser, and so they have 20,000 apps — which might be potential in a Fortune 100 firm — then they must take a look at all these apps in opposition to that browser. However the truth that Island relies on the Chromium commonplace signifies that IT can belief the browser with out having to place all the pieces via a prolonged testing course of. “The browser world standardized on Chromium. This concept couldn’t have come to fruition earlier than that,” Fey stated.

Regardless of the worth proposition and the standardized strategy, Fey says it nonetheless takes some explaining to get executives to know that by paying for a security-focused browser, they’ll really lower your expenses in the long term. “It’s important to clarify the place the ROI comes from. What am I getting? The place’s it coming from? And the ROI needs to be very comprehensible and really plausible and huge,” he stated.

How massive? Contemplate that he says one firm saved $300 million a yr shutting down racks in an information middle as a result of they didn’t require practically the identical degree of assets anymore to run the identical purposes.

Fey says it’s not about changing these instruments, a lot as the truth that profiting from a standardized browser simply makes it a lot simpler to execute on issues like net filtering and even digital desktops. It sounds easy, however the firm has 280 workers, of which 100 are engineers. He says numerous engineering work went into making this occur.

Whereas he wouldn’t talk about particular income numbers, the corporate has round 200 clients, and has been rising steadily over the previous couple of years. Leone referred to it as exponential development.

Fey thinks that Island is usually a substantial public firm finally. “We’re stepping into respectable ARR at this level, significant ARR, and our margins are good,” he stated. “So you understand what we expect is we’ll make a robust IPO candidate sometime, however not subsequent yr. Sometime.”