Galeal Zino

Founder & CEO NetFoundry

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Galeal Zino is the founder and chief executive of NetFoundry, a Charlotte, North Carolina company selling zero-trust connectivity as software. His argument, which he has made consistently in public, is that TCP/IP was designed for a world of trusted networks and fixed locations and is a poor foundation for one in which workloads, APIs, containers and AI agents need to reach each other across clouds and continents. NetFoundry’s answer is an identity-first overlay: connections are authorised on the identity of the workload rather than the address of the machine, which lets applications communicate without open inbound ports, VPN concentrators or firewall changes. The technical core is OpenZiti, an open-source zero-trust networking project that NetFoundry invented and maintains, with the company selling the managed commercial platform built on top. Unusually for a networking startup, the business began inside a telecoms carrier: Zino built it within Tata Communications’ internal entrepreneurship programme, grew it to $1M in annual recurring revenue, and spun it out as an independent company in September 2019.

Career Highlights

• Founded NetFoundry and has led it as CEO from incubation through independence, alongside co-founders David Hart, now CTO, and Robert Caamano, now head of cloud engineering.
• Built the company inside Tata Communications’ Shape the Future entrepreneurship programme, reaching $1M in annual recurring revenue in under two years with three consecutive quarters of more than 50% growth.
• Spun NetFoundry off as an independent subsidiary of the Tata Communications Group on 26 September 2019.
• Created OpenZiti, the open-source zero-trust networking platform NetFoundry describes as the most widely used of its kind, and built the commercial product on the same codebase the company maintains in the open.
• Closed a Series A of more than $15M announced in November 2025, led by SYN Ventures with CircleRock participating and Cisco Investments joining as a strategic investor.
• Scaled the platform to more than a billion secured sessions a month across three continents, with customers including Fortune 10 companies in healthcare, financial services and energy.
• Served as vice president of innovation at Tata Communications, where he built a substantial revenue business and launched video conferencing, unified communications and WebRTC products.
• Spent more than two decades in telecommunications before that, including engineering leadership at Teleglobe and ITXC.

Professional Journey

Zino’s career started in the plumbing of global telecommunications, in the era when voice traffic was moving onto IP networks. He held engineering leadership roles at ITXC, which became a major carrier of international traffic, and at Teleglobe, work that put him close to the hard problems of moving traffic reliably between networks that do not trust each other. That is, in retrospect, the same problem NetFoundry now sells software to solve, several abstraction layers up.

He then joined Tata Communications, eventually as vice president of innovation, where he built and launched products in video conferencing, unified communications and WebRTC and grew a significant revenue line. Tata ran an internal programme called Shape the Future, designed to let employees start new ventures with startup-like autonomy while the parent funded them. Zino used it to build NetFoundry. The premise was that enterprises should be able to spin up private, secure networking programmatically, the same way they provision compute from a cloud provider, rather than filing tickets and waiting on circuits and firewall rules.

It worked well enough inside the carrier to justify letting it go. By September 2019, when Tata Communications announced NetFoundry would spin off as an independent subsidiary, the business had passed $1M in annual recurring revenue in under two years and had strung together three consecutive quarters of more than 50% growth. Zino continued as founder and CEO of the independent company, with David Hart as CTO and Robert Caamano leading cloud engineering, both co-founders.

Independence let the company make a bet that a carrier subsidiary probably could not have: open source. NetFoundry built and maintains OpenZiti, releasing the core zero-trust networking technology openly while selling the managed platform, support and orchestration around it. That has become the company’s principal distribution mechanism, since developers can adopt the open project and embed zero-trust connectivity directly into an application, with the commercial offering available when it goes into production at scale. The framing Zino uses is Identity-First Virtual Networks - secure-by-design overlays created as software, with no inbound ports exposed.

The market moved toward that position rather than away from it, particularly as AI workloads, APIs and machine-to-machine traffic multiplied the number of things needing to connect securely across boundaries. NetFoundry now reports securing more than a billion sessions a month across three continents for customers in regulated industries including healthcare, financial services and energy. In November 2025 the company announced a Series A of more than $15M led by SYN Ventures, with CircleRock participating and Cisco Investments coming in strategically. Zino framed the Cisco relationship as a partnership in reinventing networking for a hyperconnected, AI-driven world, arguing that the foundational assumptions of TCP/IP no longer match what is being asked of it.

Education

Bucknell University

No degree, field of study or graduation year appears in any source consulted; only the institution is reported, and only by secondary aggregators.