Island, a late-stage startup selling a security-themed enterprise browser, on Wednesday announced another massive $250 million Series E funding round that pushes its valuation to nearly $5 billion.
The company, which maintains offices in Texas and Israel, said the new investment was provided by Coatue Management and brings Island’s total external funding to approximately $730 million since its launch in 2020..
The latest raise is a signal that investors remain bullish on startups in the security browser space despite competitive pressures from tech giants like Microsoft and Google.
Island’s chief executive Mike Fey is pitching the enterprise browser to businesses as a replacement for consumer-grade web browsers that are a constant target for malicious attackers.
“The Enterprise Browser upgrades web browsers from a dedicated consumer software package to an enterprise-ready solution, adding value to knowledge workers, IT departments, and security teams. Island improves productivity, simplifies the IT stack, reduces complexity, and embeds security,” Fey said in a note announcing the new funding.
He positioned the Island browser as the “cornerstone of their IT modernization initiatives” and said the new money would be used to scale product development and speed up staff expansion.
Island’s technology promises full last-mile control to enterprise security teams to manage and control things like copy, paste, download, upload, and screenshot capture, and more advanced security demands like data redaction, watermarking and multi-factor authentication insertion.
Island has approximately 500 employees, with more than 200 in product development and engineering.
Since emerging from stealth in February 2022, Island said it has won about 450 customers across every major vertical and size of organization, from Fortune 1000 enterprises to small and midmarket companies to government agencies and higher education institutions.
The funding comes at a time when Microsoft has signaled a significant push into the market with a new product called “Microsoft Edge for Business” that natively separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows with their own favorites, separate caches and storage locations.
Like Microsoft, Google has long targeted businesses with a security-themed Chrome product promising protection from web-based threats and tools to simplify management and security.
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Related: Enterprise Browser Startup Island Snags Massive Funding Round
