Doxx.net takes its plans for Agentic Defined Networking live with $38M backing.
It used to take a large team of engineers years to build a new networking startup. AI changes that game entirely.
Barrett Lyon has founded (and sold) multiple networking vendors over the last two decades, including Prolexic (acquired by Akamai ), defense.net (acquired by F5 Networks), and netography (acquired by Vectra AI). Now he has turned his attention to AI with a new startup launching this week that offers the promise of Agentic Defined Networking. The platform lets users and their AI agents build private networks. The company also announced a $38 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Animo Ventures and Focal.vc.
Doxx.net has its roots in the Darkflare project that Lyon created as a hobby for a TCP tunnel over Cloudflare that could tunnel through public networks in a way that helps to avoid detection and potential censorship. The response to DarkFlare led Lyon to consider a VPN that cannot be stopped and is autonomously managed by AI.
“The hobby turned into an obsession, and the obsession turned into a business,” Lyon told Network World.
How the Agentic Defined Network platform works
The platform combines custom VPN transports, a company-run mesh, and a separate control plane.
Covert transports: The doxx.net client supports WireGuard and custom transports for VPN traffic over WebSocket, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), ping, QUIC, Cloudflare and HTTPS. The transports are designed to get through firewalls.
Mesh: The mesh connects every site to every site with encryption. It runs over IPv4 and IPv6 and is orchestrated through an application programming interface (API).
Control plane: Lyon said the client app is a device and not a control plane. Routing, port forwarding and firewall rules are managed in a separate portal.
Addressing: Devices on the mesh are not behind network address translation (NAT) or carrier-grade NAT, according to Lyon. That allows peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.
DNS and certificates: The company runs its own Domain Name System (DNS) root with 196 domains and its own certificate authority. Lyon said it wrote its own Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) daemon and runs internal BGP across the mesh.
Identity and discovery: The address book holds no phone numbers, email addresses, or names. Users exchange cryptographic keys and assign an alias to each contact. A directory service called Share.docsnet seeds a new device with the data needed to find its contacts. After that call, devices sync with each other.
How AI runs the network and what agents can do on it
The need for doxx.net to be run by AI is pragmatic; Lyon said he turned to AI because he could not manage the network by himself.
“The whole thing is run completely by AI, so behind the scenes, I mean, it’s a network with 31 locations around the world, and internally there’s a mesh network, and I can’t, as a human being, manage all of this by myself,” Lyon said.
Lyon said the team modeled every site, down to the wire and the optic, in a virtual model before building. An infrastructure management system running the company’s own AI on its own hardware then ordered the installation. It orchestrated shipping and delivery through data center APIs. Human technicians performed the remote smart hands installations.
The company also built tools for agents to work with users and with the network. An agent gateway gives an AI agent an identity in the doxx.net chat app. The user pastes a credential into the agent. The agent obtains its certificate and appears in the user’s chat. Users can create group chats with several agents. In one example, Lyon said one agent runs BGP while others handle other tasks.
The API is self-teaching. An agent given the config.doxx.net URL can learn how to build networks without further instructions. It then asks what the user wants to do, such as link an office to a house or give a Linux box a private IP address. Agents can also create their own domains and host names, sign certificates, and run web servers and applications inside the network.
Administrators issue read-only or admin tokens for each agent. Tokens can expire or be revoked. An administrator can also cut an agent’s gateway access or delete the agent in the app.
“You don’t just give them your account credentials to the master account,” said Lyon.
From 1992 to 2026 and beyond
The term ‘doxxing’ usually refers to publishing someone’s private information, but that’s the exact opposite of what doxx.net is all about. As it turns out, Lyon registered the domain more than 30 years ago, as it was his hacker name at the time.
“So, I’m just reclaiming the word, and it is kind of funny that we’re doing the exact opposite of what doxing is. And, I don’t know, it just seems fitting for me,” he said.
Looking forward, the plan is to build out more enterprise offerings as well as release some code as open source. Fundamentally, the technology is not just about using AI for networking but also about using AI to build the technology itself.
“You can have a vision of where it’s going to go, and then that vision hits a wall when you hit, you know, your own personal limitations,” Lyon said. “The AI just takes it well beyond, running this with an agentic partner, so to speak, turns this into fire.”
