From BOOTTRAPPED to Millions: How North spent “hundreds of millions of VPN customers to turn Lithuania technology

North Security began as a obscure and starting company in a part of the world where technological champions are rare: Lithuania.

But it did not take long to become a mainstream with its cybersecurity (and sometimes expensive) and virtual network (VPN).

Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas saw this opportunity in 2012 as they pursued races and decided that it was worth exploring.

Nord applied simple logic to help -grow it: people trust the Internet for everything, which means that the need for online safety will only increase over time. In fact, he did: North he found a large market among Internet surfers with a privacy hunger.

Okmanas admits that when the company was founded, “no one cared” outside a few technology companies that were taken seriously cybersecurity.

As they continued to build north, cases of use and demand grew. This also meant that the founding duo had to be adapted in more than engineering.

“Now I have had to learn (about) finances, the legal world, the corporate government and then how to run teams and companies,” said Okmanas Fortune Last year.

Better known for their VPN software, North allows users to use the Internet while protecting their data and IP addresses. This means more privacy for the average user when browsing the web, but technology is also very controversial.

VPNs can be used to avoid Government restrictions on the network and have been attacked by Hollywood film studies For its use in piracy and copyright infringement.

But North, based in Lithuania, it is not affected by these legal and ethical concerns. It focuses on strengthening its main case of use safely through the web. The company’s servers do not register the data of the users, who are part of the privacy spiel. Has argued That ad nauseum, and said Fortune May the people who use VPN only to access blocked or not available streaming services are “obsolete”.    

Okmanas says that north tools are rarely used for illegal or illegal purposes. The company also has underway systems to avoid security breaches and other online threats.

“Our goal is to connect as many people as possible to this north cloud network, where people could use it in a very safe way,” he said.

The vpn world and more

Great northern growth strokes are notable: in 2022, ten years after its foundation, it reached Unicorn stateIt has more than 15 million users worldwide and is one of the best -known companies in Lithuania (twenty is another).

Okmanas said that North has experienced “enormous growth” over the years. In September 2023, the company raised $ 100 million with a valuation of $ 3 billion, almost double the amount it collected when it became unicorn a year earlier.

The company has been shopping to help your expansion. Announced a merger with surfshark by 2022 and bought the Ironwall competitor this year, helping north to grow its weight cybersecurity And beyond. Most of the northern users base is focused on the United States and covers a wide range of age, while the rest of its customers are a mixed bag of medium and medium and medium -sized internet users.

North has made his presence feel: it is not unusual to stumble upon his ads as he listened to a podcast or watching a YouTube or Tiktok video (his VPN was seen to be used by rapper Drake Bloomberg reported)). Okmanas says this is a deliberate effort to educate more people in the north online tools. This is just one of the many ways the company spends to get new customers on board, as online threats continue to go down.

“We enjoy hundreds of dollars for our customer acquisition and works. Users see the value and we are very happy,” said Okmanas.

The next north steps

North has another building in Vilnius, as it continues to expand it business. For large -scale companies like north, an OIP looks like the next natural step (at least this is what Airbnb and Uber did, and it is one of the routes companies are attracted to).

But north does not see it. Its purpose is to prepare for IPO, but not necessarily to make public immediately, as it is a good barometer where the company is.

“We have great ambitions, but we don’t need to make an OIP,” said Okmanas. North may have started small, but it has been profitable from the beginning. It became Ebitda-Positive last year.

He said that North has no deadline, but he wants to prepare it so that he is ready for an OIP in the “button press”.

“But surely, we do not need it and we will not do it in the next six months or a year,” said the co-director.

“We are in a very lucky position where we grow extremely fast and we are very profitable.”

A version of this story was originally published Fortune.com On September 30, 2024.

This story originally presented to Fortune.com

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