Island lands $250M in funding at a $4.8B valuation

Enterprise browser startup Island just raised a sizable funding round — one that bumps up its valuation significantly, and less than one year after its last fundraise.

Dallas-based Island raised $250 million in a Series E round led by Coatue that valued the company at $4.85 billion, the startup announced today. This brings the company’s total funding to $730 million. Other backers in the round include Insight Partners, Sequoia, and Canapi Ventures, among others.

Island builds online browsers that are designed for enterprises and are meant to be more secure than traditional commercial search engines. They also have universal application access control, device visibility and management, and application automation, among other features.

“When enterprises use browsers designed for consumer activities, they must add layers, bolt-on additional technology, and reinforce their infrastructure to meet minimum business requirements. This leads to increased complexity, rising costs, and diminished productivity,” Island co-founder and CEO Mike Fey told TechCrunch over email. “By adopting a browser purpose-built for the enterprise, IT organizations can streamline their technology stacks, significantly cut expenses, improve user access and productivity, enhance cybersecurity, and modernize the way work gets done. Adopting the enterprise browser is a singular, simple change that transforms operations for the better.”

This Series E round marks a notable step up for the nearly 5-year-old company. It raised $175 million in a Series D round that valued the company at $2.9 billion just 11 months ago, co-led by Sequoia and Coatue.

At the time, Sequoia partner Doug Leone told TechCrunch that he was attracted to the company right off the bat due to Island’s team and unique value proposition.

“The two founders, one of whom was a technical founder out of Israel — Dan Amiga — and one who was a very senior security executive out of the U.S. — Fey — had a vision that if you could produce a browser based on Chromium that looks like a standard browser to the consumer employee in a corporation but was secure, it would stop bad guys from doing a whole bunch of things,” Leone told TechCrunch at the time.

Enterprises are clearly buying into the mission, too, as the company now counts 450 customers, among them Mattress Firm, Swiss Life, and Fiverr.

This story was updated on April 3 to include commentary from Mike Fey.