DNSFilter was born out of necessity. DNSFilter’s CEO and co-founder, Ken Carnesi, was fed up with existing DNS security solutions on the market.
They were either overpriced, outdated, or ineffective. Instead of settling for a subpar solution, he set out to create one that he’d trust for himself and his clients.
DNSFilter was founded in October 2015. The goal for CEO Ken Carnesi, Chief Architect Brian Gillis, along with former Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroll was a big one. They set out to create "The Best DNS Filter On The Market." Their vision was to build a product that would be more effective at blocking threats than other solutions, while also maintaining ease-of-use, and world-class support.
In 2018, after being long-time customers, we acquired the company Webshrinker: an AI-driven domain categorization tool that powers our ability to classify and filter sites on the fly.
Pairing Webshrinker with our DNS security solution has made us the most effective solution in the DNS security market.
There were just three of us when we started out. Today, we're over 115.
It was a big milestone for us, as we were able to prove that we had a solution that was necessary—and works.
This was just the beginning of external buy-in in DNSFilter.
Webshrinker is what powers DNSFilter's threat efficacy. This was a momentous occasion for us, and we were able to expand our product offering.
Interested in Webshrinker?
We were still small compared to where we are now. By this point, we were big enough to really put some muscle behind expanding our features—Roaming Clients in particular.
Despite a worldwide pandemic, we grew our team, added new functionality to our product, and added more customers than we ever had at that point. We even started a partnership with Lenovo's LanSchool.
We raised $33.5 million from Insight Partners and Arthur Ventures. We were one of the biggest cybersecurity Series A's in 2021—we were tied for third with four other companies.
It's early in 2022, but we've already launched our one-click Application blocking tool AppAware and plan to launch a range of features to help our customers.
What does it mean to change the way the world thinks about security via DNS? It means we're advocates for a layered approach to cybersecurity. We understand that the world is now remote. We want to decentralize cybersecurity. And we're here to help you adopt Zero Trust.
Our threat categorization is driven by machine learning and supplemented by external feeds—giving our customers the most complete product
Support is timely, efficient, and friendly—when our customers have an issue, we want to be there to fix it and take pride in giving them an answer
We are listening to our customers—we prioritize features that are wanted
We thought of going with a clever startup name—you know, adding “ly” or “io” to some noun evocative of freshness. Maybe we’d drop a vowel or two and go all lowercase. Instead, we decided to keep it simple. Straightforward. As an essential tool, DNSFilter is named for exactly what it does. We filter DNS requests, sorting the good from the bad to help our users get through their work days feeling more secure.
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