The Tunneling Revolution

How Alan Shreve's simple idea to solve localhost development turned into the world's most trusted tunneling platform, connecting 4 million developers globally.

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Developers
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Daily Requests
Terminal — ngrok
$ ngrok http 3000
Session Status: online
Version: 3.5.0
# Secure tunnel established
Forwarding: https://abc123.ngrok.io
# Local server: localhost:3000
HTTPS encryption enabled
Request monitoring active

What is Ngrok?

In 2013, Alan Shreve faced a frustrating problem while working as a software engineer: testing webhooks and sharing local development environments required complex networking knowledge that most developers didn't have.

His solution was elegantly simple: what if you could expose your localhost to the internet with a single command? No configuration, no networking expertise, no firewall changes.

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To make the internet more accessible to developers by removing the barriers between local development and global connectivity.

This simple concept grew into Ngrok Inc., fundamentally changing how millions of developers work worldwide and democratizing internet connectivity for the development community.

AS

Alan Shreve

Founder & CEO

Former software engineer with experience at leading tech companies. Alan identified the critical need for simple, secure tunneling while working on webhook integrations. His vision was to democratize internet connectivity for developers worldwide.

The Journey

From weekend project to essential developer infrastructure

2013

The First Code

Alan writes the first version of ngrok as a personal tool to solve webhook testing problems. The initial Go application creates simple HTTP tunnels to localhost.

2015

Open Source Release

Ngrok 1.0 launches as open source. The developer community quickly adopts it, with thousands of downloads and rapid word-of-mouth growth.

2017

Company Founded

Ngrok Inc. officially founded in San Francisco. Alan raises seed funding to build sustainable business around professional tunneling services.

2021

Series A Funding

$25M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners enables global expansion, team growth, and development of advanced API gateway features.

2025

Global Scale

4 million developers across 100+ countries rely on ngrok, processing 50M+ daily requests through global edge network infrastructure.

How It Works

The technology behind instant internet connectivity

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Secure Protocol

Custom protocol built on HTTP/2 with TLS 1.3 encryption, perfect forward secrecy, and certificate pinning. All traffic encrypted end-to-end with military-grade security.

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Global Network

25+ edge locations worldwide with intelligent routing algorithms. Anycast DNS automatically directs traffic to the nearest server for optimal performance.

Edge Computing

Advanced load balancing, automatic failover, and health checks. Can handle millions of concurrent connections with sub-50ms latency globally.