Hello everybody, and welcome. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Michael Fey, the co-founder and CEO of Island, which is a fast rising cybersecurity company behind the enterprise browser platform. Michael's fresh off a big win, Island was just honored at the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards 2025 with the HyperCUBEd Innovation Award and the startup category. First off, Michael, good to see you. Congratulations on this award. Really appreciate you coming on.
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
So let me just give some background. The CUBEd's panel of experts, I think we had 40 judges recognized Island for, "Redefining how enterprises secure work and proving that an enterprise browser can actually be a powerful application delivery platform that makes work more secure, simpler to access, builds trust, makes people more productive." So we're really excited to dive into what that means and why Island's work is turning heads in the cybersecurity world. But as well, Michael, this recognition comes in the heels of another major milestone for Island, a $250 million Series E funding round, which was just recently announced. It was led by Coatue Management with participation from top tier backers. I think Sequoia was in there, the venerable insight partners. So it puts you, I believe in a valuation of nearly $5 billion.
Yeah. So pretty impressive vote of confidence. In a press release, you mentioned that this new funding is going to help you scale your product development and your talent acquisition to meet the demands of enterprises, the changing IT needs. So your vision is resonating with investors. I did a sit down with Nikesh Arora recently. He was very happy about the acquisition they made pointing to Island. So you're getting the attention of top name CEOs. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, one, we're honored to have won the award, so that's great. We really appreciate that. Our team does strive to be innovative. We do think what we're doing is game changing and the round was an affirmation of that. When we were approached with that large an evaluation, it was not a scheduled round, it was a preemptive round. It opened up the opportunity to press this process yet faster and continue going on a global path quicker. So we've expanded our reach, we've expanded our go-to-market reach and now we're growing that R&D org and it feels almost limitless, the areas we can add value from this platform. So the bigger the R&D org, the more value we can give the customers. So it's a wonderful thing and we're proud of both accomplishments.
Yeah. So those folks that might not be familiar with Island says it's missions to transform everyday web browser into enterprise ready workspace. Michael's own words, I pulled this from SiliconANGLE, "The enterprise browser upgrades web browsers from a dedicated consumer software package to an enterprise-ready solution, one that improves productivity, simplifies the IT stack, reduces complexity and embeds security directly into the user's browsing experience." Michael, I wonder if you could just explain that in more detail, the problem that you set out to solve and how you've made that browser more secure for businesses.
Sure. So if we think about the consumer browser, what a wonderful application. We've all used it for the last 30 years and because it's dedicated for consumers, it does a lot of wonderful things for us when we're shopping, when we're doing personal research, when we're gathering information, that's all wonderful. But we bring it into the enterprise, we have to bolt on so many security controls and productivity controls and access controls and you have data management and the list goes on and on and on. You started to see that the bifurcation of the needs of the consumer and the needs of the enterprise are really stressing the overall tech environment. So we set out to do was to reimagine how the browser works, we stood on top of the open source project called Chromium, which is behind the great browsers like Chrome and Edge and Opera and Brave and all those. And we took that open source project and re-imagined it for three constituencies. Instead of the consumer, the shopper, the advertising need. We said, "All right. What about the knowledge worker at work? What about the IT staff that has to support them? And what about cybersecurity?" And we went around and we built into the browser solutions to push forward all of those agendas. So this is a platform that's fully managed by an enterprise that can deliver a Island of safety, an Island of security and productivity on a device they don't even own, regardless of form factor. And all it takes is a simple push of a link, opposed to shipping hardware, standing up, VPNs, backhauling traffic, standing up sassy infrastructures, just the mountain of tech debt that gets built by that demand starts to flow away. And that's why we've had the penetration we've had. I mean we've got seven of the 10 largest US banks are using us, the healthcare similar representation. Now, we're getting into militaries and we're getting into public schools, but we're also involved in helping a lot of young companies just do it right the first time. So it's been an amazing journey, as we collaborate with all these great companies on how to make this platform more dedicated, more capable for their needs.
I wonder if I could follow up on that. I mean, just to your point, the browser was never meant to be a corporate security tool. It was really a consumer crawl the web, buy stuff, and you've really flipped that model specifically for enterprises. So you just laid out what that means for security policies in terms of simplification. I wonder if you could just double click on that and help us understand how organizations are deploying, what their lives are like, how it's different and you talked about some of the traction you're seeing in some key industries, but I wonder if you could just double click on that a little bit.
Yeah. Let's take a basic call center today. A call center today, it might be a BPO. You might outsource that function. The minute you do that, now you're shipping them laptops, they're standing up a VPN to connect back to that corporate infrastructure. They're a contractor asset effectively. That traffic then spins up into that company, they open up a VDI session, something like Citrix or something like that. Then that traffic gets backhauled again. Then that traffic goes to a web filtering organization that then runs DOP checks on it and then finally gets to go to say Salesforce, the actual target. And then we have to augment that whole thing with things to understand the digital experience. And maybe we've got to build a robotic process automation with yet another couple tools. So what we're able to do is just take that browser in the Island format, and that browser now can just be sent to that BPO. The minute they do it, we connect to the VoIP system. So now we see who's calling, we fill a copy paste buffer with 50 pieces of information we know about that customer. They can drag and drop that. We can track that and turn that into an automated function. They don't have to have that traffic backhauled. It goes directly to where it needs to and the data stays where the organization wants it. So we can say these seven applications represent the day of a call center worker. Let's make all of those shared data but nowhere else. And we do that without VDI, without the backhaul, without the VPN, without the dedicated hardware. So the network's smaller, the expense is smaller and the security improves. But that call center worker now has basic automation back. Things that you and the consumer world would be upset by. Imagine if you had to put in your address every time you shopped. Well, think about that call center worker running across the same business case 5,000 times a day. That now can be automated as well. And then the IT team has all they need to give compliance, control, visibility. It's built into that. So the amount of tech around it shrinks. That means the resiliency improves, the uptime gets better, the end user responses better, but just importantly, the productivity of that worker improves and that worker wants to be productive. There's nothing more frustrating than repetitive tasks and things that don't make sense to a worker that they have to fight through every day at a job. So by removing that friction, we're able to add significant ROI and value out to all three constituencies, the business, the IT team and security. And that's what's really happening right now. We're having dramatic impacts on IT budgets.
We talked about this a little bit last year at RSA because I asked you why you started the company, but I want to ask you, you probably get this question a lot. How'd you come up with the concept of the enterprise browser? I mean, what signals did you see? What were the problems that you were hearing back then when you started the company from your customers? Because people always want to know like where did these ideas germinate? How did you start the company? Take us back there.
Yeah. Well, my co-founder brought this idea forward that, "Mike, with this open source browser now, we can embed cyber security a bit." And that was intriguing. But the more we thought about it and say, "Are people really going to modify how they work just to get better with cyber security?" Cyber security has always been hidden in the shadows. So we thought about it some more and then we realized, "Wait a second, the browser itself, if you go back 30 years ago, looks exactly the same, the same buttons, the same controls, the basic same functionality." To the end user, it's the same app. So right away you start to think, wait a second. That's something that can be disruptive because it has been stagnant for so long. And have we really rethought what a knowledge worker does today? And when you realize that all of software is writing to the browser, not to the operating systems anymore, you realize that becomes a critical control point. So we went and we met with 100 CIOs and CISOs before we ever found with the company that we knew. We pitched them the idea and I think 97 out of 100 said, you got to do it. We've actually since got those last three as customers, so we're proud. We got a full circle on that. But it really was starting with what cyber security needed and realizing you had to give wins back to the end user. You have to do more than just be secure. You have to impact the business. And what we didn't realize five years ago is this is how the industry is moving at large. The CISOs are becoming the chief information security officers, are becoming CIOs. CIOs are now very capable security professionals as well. It's just part of the core job. So organizations are now looking at cyber security as something that needs to be baked into their platforms, not just added on. And we get to be one of the first real plays they can make with that new initiative.
