OpenDNS

OpenDNS was founded by David Ulevitch, a Washington University in St. Louis computer science/anthropology graduate who had already built and sold DNS management tooling (EveryDNS, founded 2001, later acquired by Dyn in 2010). Ulevitch launched OpenDNS's recursive DNS resolution service in July 2006 (the company itself is commonly dated to 2005), with early venture backing from Minor Ventures, the investment vehicle of CNET founder Halsey Minor, who is credited on some sources (including Crunchbase) as a co-founder. The core insight was that DNS -- the internet's directory lookup layer, sitting in front of nearly all web traffic -- could be re-architected as a security and infrastructure chokepoint: OpenDNS's free consumer service blocked phishing and malicious domains, offered optional content filtering, and was faster and more reliable than many ISP-provided resolvers, while a companion project, PhishTank (launched October 2006), crowdsourced a public database of phishing URLs.

OpenDNS grew primarily as a free, ad-supported consumer service through the late 2000s (interim CEO Nand Mulchandani led the company for roughly a year in 2008-2009 before Ulevitch returned as CEO), while quietly building an enterprise business (OpenDNS Enterprise, 2009) targeting IT security teams. Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners became significant shareholders in 2009-2010 via secondary purchases of Minor's equity stake, and both firms backed the company through subsequent primary rounds, including a 2013 Series B and a $35 million Series C in May 2014 that also drew participation from Glynn Capital Management (lead), Northgate Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Lumia Capital, Evolution Equity Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and -- notably -- a strategic investment from Cisco itself, alongside individual investors including Chris Sacca, Naval Ravikant, and Elad Gill. Under CTO Dan Hubbard (joined 2012), OpenDNS accelerated its pivot toward enterprise cloud security, launching Umbrella (November 2012) as a network security suite for employees working outside the corporate perimeter, followed by the Security Graph threat-intelligence engine (February 2013), the Investigate research tool (November 2013), and an Intelligent Proxy (January 2014). By mid-2013 the company was resolving over 50 billion DNS requests per day from tens of millions of users worldwide, and was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2011.

On June 29, 2015, Cisco announced it would acquire OpenDNS for approximately $635 million in an all-cash transaction (plus retention-based incentives for employees), with the deal completing on August 27, 2015. Cisco framed the acquisition as a cornerstone of its cloud-delivered security strategy, valuing OpenDNS's global DNS-layer visibility (the company's anycast network handled an enormous share of global DNS traffic) as a uniquely early vantage point for detecting malware, command-and-control traffic, and phishing infrastructure before a connection was even established. David Ulevitch joined Cisco as Vice President of Cisco Security, later becoming SVP/General Manager of Cisco's Security Business Group, before departing Cisco in late 2018 to become a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Business model

Freemium: free consumer/home DNS resolution and filtering service (monetized historically via a now-discontinued domain-typo advertising program) alongside paid enterprise/MSP subscription products (OpenDNS Enterprise, Umbrella) sold on a per-seat/per-network basis.

Subscription/SaaS revenue from enterprise and MSP customers (Umbrella, OpenDNS Enterprise); consumer product was free, historically supplemented by ad revenue from mistyped-domain redirects (discontinued June 2014).