The News
Zeroport raised $10 million in seed funding to accelerate global expansion and product development for its non-IP secure remote access platform, Fantom. The round was led by lool ventures with participation from Clarim Ventures, CyberFuture, and Elron Ventures.
Analysis
Remote Access Is a Structural Weak Point in Modern AppDev and Security
Secure remote access has become a foundational dependency for modern application development, IT operations, and operational technology (OT) environments. Yet the market remains dominated by IP-based architectures (VPNs, bastion hosts, and zero-trust overlays) that expand attack surfaces rather than eliminate them. High-profile breaches, including the compromise of CISA systems via VPN vulnerabilities, underscore a broader industry issue: remote connectivity has outpaced the security models designed to protect it. From a market perspective, this explains why secure remote access has grown into a ~$30B segment expanding at roughly 20% annually, driven by hybrid work, distributed infrastructure, and OT digitization pressures.
Why Zeroport’s Non-IP Model Stands Out
Zeroport’s Fantom platform challenges a long-standing industry assumption that remote access must be IP-based. By using patented hardware to create a physical, non-IP bridge at the network boundary, Fantom restricts inbound traffic to human interaction signals and outbound traffic to display-only pixel streams. From an application and systems standpoint, this is less an incremental security control and more a hard architectural boundary. Efficiently Connected has observed similar inflection points in other domains, where removing entire classes of risk (rather than detecting them) fundamentally reshapes how developers and operators think about system exposure. This hardware-enforced isolation approach positions Zeroport differently from traditional VPN, ZTNA, or software-defined perimeter solutions.
Remote Access Shifts from Software Controls to Architectural Prevention
The secure remote access market is undergoing a structural re-evaluation as enterprises confront the limits of software-defined security models. VPNs, ZTNA, and identity-centric access layers remain widely deployed, but recent breaches and ransomware campaigns have exposed a growing gap between theoretical zero-trust principles and real-world operational risk. In practice, IP-based connectivity continues to expand attack surfaces faster than security teams can monitor or mitigate them.
At the same time, the industry is seeing increased convergence between IT security, OT security, and application development workflows. As organizations modernize industrial systems, digitize field operations, and enable remote monitoring for critical infrastructure, the tolerance for probabilistic security controls is declining. CISOs are increasingly prioritizing deterministic security outcomes, or controls that remove entire classes of risk rather than detect or respond to them after exposure has already occurred.
This shift mirrors broader trends in application development and platform engineering, where architectural simplification and isolation are being favored over layered complexity. Just as container isolation, immutable infrastructure, and policy-as-code reshaped cloud-native design, secure access architectures are now being evaluated on how effectively they reduce blast radius and operational overhead. In this environment, non-IP and hardware-enforced isolation models are gaining attention as complementary approaches for high-risk, high-value environments where traditional remote access models struggle to deliver acceptable security assurance.
What a Hardware-First Shift Could Change Going Forward
Zeroport’s approach suggests a different path forward: instead of securing IP traffic, eliminate it entirely for remote access use cases. For developers and operators, this could simplify security architectures by removing the need for multiple overlapping controls while enabling remote workflows that were previously impossible. Importantly, this model does not assume universal applicability; software-defined access will remain necessary for many enterprise scenarios. However, for high-risk and high-value environments, non-IP isolation may become an increasingly attractive design choice, particularly as regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical risk intensify.
Why This Matters to the Industry
- Remote access is now a primary attack vector, not a secondary one, especially in OT and critical infrastructure.
- Eliminating IP exposure changes the security equation, shifting from detection and response to physical prevention.
- Developers and operators gain new deployment options, enabling remote monitoring and maintenance without expanding network attack surfaces.
- Stack simplification becomes possible, as hardware isolation can replace layers of legacy remote access tooling.
Looking Ahead
As enterprises continue to modernize infrastructure and application environments, pressure will mount to rethink long-standing assumptions about connectivity and trust. The secure remote access market is likely to fragment further, with software-defined solutions serving general enterprise use cases and hardware-enforced isolation gaining traction in regulated, mission-critical domains.
Zeroport’s funding round signals early investor confidence that this architectural rethink has legs beyond niche deployments. Whether non-IP remote access becomes a mainstream pattern will depend on how easily organizations can integrate it into existing workflows and how convincingly it delivers on its promise of reduced risk, lower operational cost, and simpler security postures.
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