Miami's doxx.net Raises $38 Million From a16z to Build Private Networks for People and AI Agents

MIAMI — AI agents are starting to browse, message and move money on behalf of their users. A Miami founder who spent two decades defending the public internet thinks those agents need a private network of their own, and he just raised the money to build it.

doxx.net announced a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Animo Ventures and Focal.vc. The round, disclosed Oct. 1, landed alongside the open beta of what the company calls Agentic Defined Networking, a platform that lets people and their agents create private, peer-to-peer networks without a communications server in the middle. Joel De La Garza, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is joining the board.

A Parallel Network, Not Another VPN

doxx.net’s pitch is architectural, not cosmetic. The company says it runs end to end on infrastructure it owns: its own IP space and ASN, its own DNS root, its own certificate authority, its own local AI models and its own bare-metal servers. Users can browse privately, transfer files directly, mesh devices and agents together, and place encrypted calls and chats without a middleman recording the session.

Accounts are created through proof-of-work. No email, phone number, username or password is required to start, according to the company. Native apps are available for iOS, macOS and Android, with Windows and Linux support on the way.

The security layer is aimed at a new failure mode. When an agent acts with a user’s credentials, a phishing page or malware host becomes the user’s problem. doxx.net says its DNS-level threat protection blocked more than 38 million threats during a closed beta that began in December 2025.

Built by a DDoS Pioneer

Founder and CEO Barrett Lyon is a familiar name in cybersecurity. He founded Prolexic Technologies, an early DDoS mitigation network later acquired by Akamai, and went on to start BitGravity, XDN and Defense.net, which were acquired by Tata Communications, Fortinet and F5, respectively.

“The industry sells privacy as a feature while routing your traffic through rented infrastructure they don’t own and can’t verify,” Lyon said in the company’s announcement. “We physically built something different: a platform where privacy comes from the architecture itself, not a policy document.”

Andreessen Horowitz framed the bet the same way. “The internet was never designed for privacy,” De La Garza said in the release. “doxx.net has built a one-stop privacy stack from first principles, delivering truly private security and communications capabilities, so humans and AI agents can run on a network that is private by architecture, not by marketing promise.”

In a separate firm note, De La Garza and general partner Martin Casado argued that AI makes surveillance cheaper at the same moment agents expand the surface a user has to protect.

Why It Matters for Miami

South Florida’s tech story has leaned hard into fintech, AI applications and creator tools. doxx.net is a deeper infrastructure play: a company trying to own the pipes rather than sit on top of someone else’s cloud. That kind of capital-intensive networking company used to cluster around Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia. Landing a $38 million a16z-led Series A with a Miami dateline is another data point that hard-tech founders can raise here.

The open questions are the ones every privacy product faces. Users will want to know whether peer-to-peer performance holds up on ordinary cellular networks, whether enterprises will trust a network that asks for no personal information at signup, and whether threat blocking stays ahead of attackers who already target AI agents. With open beta live and fresh capital in hand, doxx.net now has the runway to answer them in public.