Ten years ago today, we launched Netduma.
When you’re in a startup, you spend most of your time looking forward. Rarely, if ever, do you look back. Learn from your mistakes, don’t dwell on them, keep improving.
But today, we want to pause for a moment. It has been a decade, after all.
The Beginning
We launched Netduma from Iain’s parents' kitchen. Our website had just gone live, selling the Netduma R1—our first router. It was no wallflower. Frankly, it looked a bit like a fire alarm, only had 2.4GHz WiFi, but the software Iain had built was unlike anything else out there.
We sold out of those first R1s almost instantly. The e-commerce site Iain’s dad had hurriedly put together held up well. Our logistics process? Not so much. That led to many all-nighters as we worked through the order backlog.
When you’re a startup, it’s impossible to be good at everything. But to make it, you need to be exceptional at one or two things. We had two. As gamers, we knew firsthand how much lag sucks. And with Iain’s brain, we could actually do something about it.
Soon after, we moved into our first office (to the relief of Iain’s parents, whose house had begun to resemble a factory floor). We hired our first full-time employees. Word spread about what our software could do.
Bit by bit, month by month, we levelled up. We improved our software. We grew our team. We made mistakes. We learned from them. We kept going. And we repeated that over and over.
The very first Netduma office.
Looking Ahead
Fast forward to today. Our tech stack has evolved from fixing lag in games to fixing all bad Internet - for work calls, video streaming, and everything else. We’re partnered with British Telecom, Telstra, NETGEAR, Nokia, Genexis, and Mercku, with more partnerships to announce next year. Just a few weeks ago, our Service Provider business won the Scale-Up of Network X award.
We’ve got a great team, great customers, and great support around us. And we’ve managed to do all this without any investment, putting every penny we made back into R&D to make new features (more on that further down).
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been part of the journey. Whether it was buying one (or all!) of our routers, helping on the forum, or telling us how we could improve - you’ve made a difference. Every piece of feedback, the good and the bad, has helped shape who we are today.
None of this would have been possible without the support we’ve had along the way.
Thank you.
But here’s the exciting part: we’re just getting started.
For the past few years, we’ve been working on two groundbreaking features. When we first envisioned them, we weren’t sure they’d even be possible. One fixes bufferbloat once and for all, with no downsides. The other pinpoints the root causes of poor Internet performance, whenever they occur. These features are set to shake up the industry and will be announced early next year.
While it’s great to look back on the past ten years, we’re even more excited about what’s ahead. A huge thank you to our elite team in Cambridge, our incredible partners, and everyone who has supported us along the way.
Thank you, Luke, Iain, and the entire Netduma Team
P.S. If you haven’t yet bought our award-winning Netduma R3 router, which runs the very latest Netduma software, you can use the code ‘10Years’ for 10% off—this week only.
