Dope Security, a Cork-based web security firm that targets the Secure Web Gateway (SWG) market, said it has raised €3.9m investment from US based Boldstart Ventures. 

SWGs are a security barrier that stops a network from accessing malicious websites or web traffic, and have become even more prominent as the economy has embraced remote working, as a worker’s home network connection is likely more prone to malware than an office connection.

Legacy SWGs send web traffic from the connection through a remote web proxy to ‘clean’ it, which adds delays, increases the risk of network outages and dampens privacy.

Dope Security has developed a system whereby the anti-malware policy is applied on the device as well, removing the need for the data to ‘stopover’, which the company says offers four times better speed.

The program can only be synced with Office 365 and Google.

In Association with

Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Dope Security, likens the product to an airline flight.

“Why would you stopover when you could fly direct?" he says. “My time at legacy cybersecurity companies highlighted the need to build a first-class customer experience on top of a new architecture that eliminates reliability, performance, and privacy issues. 

“With dope.security, the Internet will never be a stopover flight again.” 

Head of product management Aidan Power stressed that Ireland remains a core part of the firm’s future.

“Ireland is at the heart of dope.security. Cork is our HQ, where we will roll out further recruitment to boost worldwide operations,” Power stated

The company has offices in San Francisco, Cork and Mumbai, and has a US patent approved for its technology.

On top of the SWG, the firm is also offering analytics and data visualisation to improve productivity, as well as the ability to debug and run diagnostics remotely.