Vancouver startup Border0 is joining Toronto-based connectivity platform Tailscale, the companies announced this week.
“Border0 is now part of Tailscale, and we’re very glad to have the team here,” stated Tailscale chief executive officer Avery Pennarun. “We’re super excited to build together.”
Tailscale “started with secure connectivity: make it easy for devices and services to talk to each other, using identity, encryption, and direct connections whenever possible,” explains Pennarun.
“Once you move from ‘Can this machine reach that machine?’ to ‘Who should be allowed into this database, cluster, or admin interface, for how long, and with what visibility into what happened after they got there?’ the problem changes shape a bit,” he says. “That’s where Border0 fits.”
Border0 is designed for infrastructure access and visibility, remote admin workflows, database access controls, session recording, and more.
Border0 has been “building the application connectivity and authorization layer: protocol-aware controls, session visibility, approval workflows, and the machinery that sits closer to the application itself,” according to Pennarun, who first met Border0 Andree Toonk at the 2025 RSA Conference in San Francisco.
“When we started Border0, the goal was simple: make infrastructure access secure without making it painful,” recalls Toonk. “We believed there had to be a better way.”
What impressed Pennarun then about Border0 “wasn’t just the feature list,” he says. “It was that they were approaching the problem with the same instincts we care about: identity-first, easy to deploy, and usable by actual humans.”
In November, “we ran into each other again at AWS re:Invent.”
Toonk showed up with a new version of his product, now more deeply integrated with Tailscale.
“That changed the whole picture,” Pennarun recalls. From there, “it stopped being a question of ‘Can we partner?’ and became ‘What could we build if we were all on the same team?'”
The more the two teams dug in, “the more it looked like a shared roadmap and a shared philosophy: strong security, minimal ceremony, and a system that people actually use,” he says. “We’re excited to have the Border0 team here.”
“The product fit was obvious,” Toonk agrees. “Tailscale built the best connectivity platform in the industry … Border0 focused on the application access layer on top of that … Put those pieces together and you get a very natural platform for secure infrastructure access.”
Being already fully integrated with Tailscale, Border0’s tech “can sit on top of your existing tailnet, identities, and policies,” notes Pennarun. “Over time, we’ll pull these capabilities closer into the Tailscale experience and build out a more native Tailscale PAM offering on top of the same foundation.”
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