Airgap

Airgap Networks was a cybersecurity company founded in 2019 in Santa Clara, California, that provided agentless, identity-based segmentation for enterprise IT, IoT and OT environments. Its core approach used a DHCP proxy to intercept device requests to join a local area network and assign each endpoint a /32 IP address and a default gateway pointing at Airgap, creating a "network of one" so that all device-to-device traffic was routed through Airgap for identity- and context-based policy enforcement. Because no endpoint software was required and no hardware upgrades or changes to existing switches and routers were needed, the approach could be applied to unmanaged devices, headless IoT sensors, legacy servers with static IPs, and operational-technology equipment such as factory controllers and medical imaging devices.

The product set included agentless segmentation, automated agentless discovery and classification of unmanaged IoT and OT devices, and a Ransomware Kill Switch — described as an industry first — which severed non-essential device-to-device communication on demand to halt lateral movement while keeping business traffic online. The company positioned this as a replacement for east-west firewalls, NAC appliances and VLAN-based access control lists, which it argued were operationally complex and prone to misconfiguration and policy drift.

In April 2024 Zscaler announced an agreement to acquire Airgap Networks, combining Airgap's segmentation with Zscaler's Zero Trust SD-WAN and Zero Trust Exchange to extend zero trust coverage to east-west traffic in branch offices, campuses, factories and plants. Airgap no longer operates as a standalone company; its technology underpins Zscaler's Zero Trust Device Segmentation.

Founding story

The company was founded in 2019 in Santa Clara by two Juniper Networks alumni, Ritesh Agrawal (CEO), who had spent close to two decades at Juniper including running product management for its security portfolio, and Satish Mohan, who brought networking architecture experience. They concluded that conventional segmentation — large firewall rule sets, NAC appliances and VLAN configuration — was the wrong approach, and instead built enforcement on top of DHCP, a protocol already present on virtually every network. The stated founding mission was to simplify and secure business-critical infrastructure.

Business model

Airgap sold an enterprise network security platform (marketed as a Zero Trust Firewall) to organizations operating IT, IoT and OT networks, deployed without endpoint agents or infrastructure replacement. Following the 2024 Zscaler acquisition, the technology is delivered as part of Zscaler's Zero Trust SASE platform.

Sold as an enterprise security product to organizations; pricing terms are not disclosed.

Traction

By the time of the 2024 acquisition the company had raised $18.6 million in total and had deployed its Zero Trust Firewall across IT, IoT and OT environments in branches, campuses and factories. Specific customer counts and revenue figures are not disclosed.

Latest developments

Zscaler announced its intent to acquire Airgap Networks on 11 April 2024, with terms undisclosed. Airgap's segmentation now operates inside Zscaler as the basis of Zero Trust Device Segmentation, and the airgap.io domain redirects to Zscaler's product pages.