With $175 million in new funding, Island is putting the browser at the center of enterprise security.

Island, the enterprise browser company, may be the most valuable startup you’ve never heard of. The company, which places the browser at the center of security, announced a $175 million Series D investment on Tuesday, at a valuation of $3 billion. Island has now raised a total of $487 million.

That’s a ton of money, and it makes us wonder: What is the company doing to justify this type of investment at this level of value? Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia who invested in Island in the first round, says he was attracted to the company’s founding team and its unique value proposition.

“The two founders, one of whom was a technical founder in Israel – Dan Amiga – and the other who was a very senior security official in the United States – Mike Fey – had the vision that if you could produce a browser Based on Chromium, it looks like a standard browser for the consumer employee of a company, but it was secure, it would stop the bad guys from doing a whole bunch of things,” Leone told TechCrunch.

He says the bottom line is that you can reduce the overall cost of security by replacing things like a VPN, data loss prevention and mobile device management, all of which can be done directly in the browser instead. instead of purchasing separate tools. This in turn could reduce the overall cost of securing a network.

Island defines a category with an enterprise browser, while allowing employees to work in a familiar environment and keeping them more secure, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“They’re using the security angle to change human computer interactions,” he said. “Think of the browser as your screen in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game and, based on all the data captured, it can deliver contextually relevant content, actions and information, but it does so while providing security enterprise-class data, process and identity.

Fey acknowledges that if he showed up at a company that had a proprietary browser and they had 20,000 applications – which would be possible at a Fortune 100 company – then they would have to test all of those applications with that browser. But the fact that Island is based on the Chromium standard means that IT can trust the browser without having to put everything through a lengthy testing process. “The world of browsers has standardized on Chromium. This idea could not have come to fruition before this,” Fey said.

Despite the value proposition and standardized approach, Fey says it will still take some explaining for executives to understand that by paying for a security-focused browser, they can actually save money in the long run. “We need to explain where the ROI comes from. What do I get? Where is that from ? And the return on investment must be very understandable, very credible and important,” he said.

How wide? Consider his claim that a company saved $300 million a year by shutting down racks in a data center because they no longer needed the same level of resources to run the same applications.

Fey says it’s not about replacing these tools, but rather that taking advantage of a standardized browser makes it much easier to perform tasks like web filtering or even virtual desktops. It seems simple, but the company has 280 employees, including 100 engineers. He says a lot of engineering work went into making this happen.

While he doesn’t want to discuss specific revenue numbers, the company has about 200 customers and has been growing steadily over the past two years. Leone called it exponential growth.

Fey believes Island could eventually become a significant public company. “We’re getting into a decent ARR at this point, a significant ARR, and our margins are good,” he said. “So you know what we think is we’ll make a strong IPO candidate one day, but not next year. A day.”