a16z 领投 doxxnet A 轮，为人和 AI 智能体构建私有网络

For the longest time, privacy felt like a concern of the few. Either you were a security and privacy nut (me) or you had bigger more immediate things to worry about. A big part of the reason for a lack of general concern was the real technical limitations to how far surveillance could go. Sure, you could record everything and maybe one day unencrypt it, but you could surely never process it all to produce a full useful picture of someone’s life. Security through obscurity was always good enough.

AI blows that up and changes the equation because it makes analyzing and connecting large amounts of information easier, cheaper and faster. Take those rapid changes to collecting data and understanding it, and add to that a world where agents act on your behalf and you have expanded the surface area you need to protect. Your agent can read documents, call APIs, move files and browse the internet with access to your data and accounts. Where the agent connects and who can observe those connections is now becoming your concern.

It turns out all you need is attention, and with that everything can be understood at scale. The breakthroughs in AI have made privacy and security concerns front and center for everyone, even if they don’t realize it yet. Enter doxxnet. doxxnet gives people and their agents a parallel, private network they can build on: browse privately, transfer files directly, connect devices and agents into encrypted meshes, and communicate peer to peer. It runs on a true software-defined global network, where users can create non-Internet domains that resolve inside the parallel internet, secured by doxxnet’s own certificate authority instead of the public Internet’s. Calls, messages, and file transfers travel directly between peers without a central communications server in the middle. DNS-level threat protection helps block connections to phishing and malware destinations before a person or agent reaches them.

Agents can also help configure the network itself: connect devices, set firewall rules, and establish private connections under the user’s policies. doxxnet calls this Agentic Defined Networking. The idea is that people and their agents should have control over the networks they use and the boundaries around their activity. doxxnet gives users control starting with the infrastructure. It has built its own global backbone with dedicated hardware, its own IP space, private naming system, and certificate authority. Users can get started without providing an email address or phone number. These are architectural choices that reduce the personal information the service needs to collect in the first place. Gone are the days where you had to rely on a sketchy VPN provider in an unknown country of origin doing god knows what with your data.

doxxnet is built by Barrett Lyon, who helped pioneer the modern DDoS defense industry with Prolexic, later acquired by Akamai. He went on to found companies including BitGravity and Defense.net, acquired by Tata Communications and F5, respectively. Barrett has spent more than two decades building networks and defending them against attackers. He has a rare combination of experience that matters when the ambition is to rethink how private networking works from the ground up.

Today we’re proud to announce our support for doxxnet as we lead their Series A, and as they pioneer the start of a real privacy choice for us all. We’re excited to partner with Barrett and the team as they build private networking for people and the agents acting on their behalf.

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