A Miami-based startup called doxx.net has raised $38 million in Series A funding and opened its platform to public beta, betting that AI agents browsing the web and executing transactions on people’s behalf need their own private, encrypted networks rather than shared infrastructure built for a pre-AI internet.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from South Florida venture firms ANIMO Ventures and Focal.vc, according to Refresh Miami. The company calls its approach “Agentic Defined Networking,” a framework meant to give both users and their AI agents private networks that support communication, file transfers, browsing, and network configuration. doxx.net’s network runs on its own IP space and its own DNS root, separate from the public domain system most of the internet relies on.
A Founder With a String of Network Security Exits
doxx.net’s founder and CEO, Barrett Lyon, has spent more than two decades working on internet infrastructure, per the same Refresh Miami report. He founded Prolexic, a company focused on defending businesses against distributed denial-of-service attacks, which Akamai Technologies acquired for approximately $370 million in cash in February 2014, according to Wikipedia.
Lyon also helped build video delivery network BitGravity, later acquired by Tata Communications in 2011, and CDN management platform XDN, acquired by Fortinet in 2012, as well as DDoS defense platform Defense.Net, which F5 Networks acquired in 2014 — a track record detailed by Security Boulevard. Each of those companies targeted a specific infrastructure bottleneck, from video streaming to attack mitigation. Lyon’s resume also includes a more artistic venture: in 2003 he launched the Opte Project, an open-source visual internet mapping initiative whose graphics were added to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Science…