ngrok offers a cloud‑native universal gateway that lets developers and operators expose any local, Kubernetes, cloud, or on‑premise service via secure tunnels without reconfiguring firewalls or VPNs. Its platform provides URL‑based endpoints, a CEL‑based Traffic Policy engine for routing, authentication, and rate‑limiting, and built‑in observability and edge processing, consolidating networking, security, and analytics into a single solution.
Funding
$50M raised to dateRaised to date based on public sources. This may differ from the amount the company actually raised and is based only on what is publicly available on the internet.
Founders
Product
Problem
Developers and operators often need to expose local services, legacy systems, or internal APIs to the internet or across networks, but configuring firewalls, VPNs, load balancers, and custom routing is complex, error‑prone, and slows iteration.
Solution
ngrok provides a cloud‑native universal gateway that consolidates networking, security, and observability into a single platform. By installing a lightweight agent or using the SDKs, users can create secure tunnels that expose any TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, or TLS service without changing firewall rules. Endpoints are defined as URLs and can be combined with expressive Traffic Policy rules—written in a CEL‑based language—to route, transform, authenticate, rate‑limit, or block traffic at any request lifecycle phase. The platform runs the traffic processing at the edge, offloading compute from the origin service and delivering built‑in analytics, logging, and real‑time inspection. This eliminates the need for separate load balancers, VPNs, and custom proxy configurations, enabling rapid development, testing, and production deployments from localhost to globally reachable services.
Target Audience
Primary users are software developers, DevOps engineers, and site reliability teams who need to expose development environments, microservices, webhooks, or internal tools quickly and securely, as well as enterprises seeking a unified gateway for API management and site‑to‑site connectivity.
Features
- Secure tunnels created via the ngrok agent or language‑specific SDKs, supporting HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and TLS protocols
- Universal Endpoint URLs that act as gateways to local, Kubernetes, cloud, or on‑premise services
- CEL‑based Traffic Policy engine for routing, header injection, OAuth, IP restrictions, rate limiting, and custom responses
- Endpoint pooling and global load balancing for high‑availability and failover across multiple instances
- Real‑time Traffic Inspector with detailed request/response logs, latency metrics, and exportable analytics
- Built‑in observability and policy enforcement at the edge, reducing load on origin services
- API and dashboard for programmatic management of endpoints, domains, and policies