Rising Star Snowpack

Snowpack is a French cybersecurity startup founded in 2021 in Orsay, operating across Zero Trust, privacy/data protection, and network security with a licensing model tied to users and/or assets and a B2B focus. Emerging from the CEA (France’s leading applied research institution) and backed by seed funding and ET Digital, it has been recognized by national innovation programs (i-Lab, i-Nov, National Cyber Strategy) and received two top French cybersecurity awards in 2024 as judged by CISO juries. Snowpack positions itself in an unconventional, emerging space that blends anonymity, privacy, and advanced threat resilience through a “Beyond Trust” approach: eliminating the need to trust infrastructure, intermediaries, or even the vendor itself.

Its core offering is a patented Virtual & Invisible Private Network (VIPN), built from the Snowpack Network Overlay (SNO) plus endpoint connectors. VIPN aims to make users, services, and infrastructure undetectable to unauthorized observers by removing network visibility and metadata exposure. The overlay currently spans 40+ nodes across seven European countries and is validated for worldwide expansion. Traffic is split into anonymized packets (“snowflakes”) routed independently across multiple nodes, combined with distributed exit nodes and collaborative IP spoofing so observers cannot reconstruct streams or trace origins/destinations. This design eliminates open ports and visible endpoints, shrinking the attack surface dramatically, while aiming to avoid Tor-like latency and usability drawbacks with enterprise-grade performance and manageability.

Snowpack targets high-risk and highly regulated environments, offering Invisible Access (anonymous internet access), Invisible Services, and Invisible Infra to protect legacy and critical systems without infrastructure changes. Key challenges include scaling customers and operations, maintaining low-latency/high-throughput at large scale, and clearly positioning the model against familiar VPN and ZTNA alternatives.

• Snowpack was founded in 2021.
• The company is headquartered in Orsay, France.
• Snowpack operates in Zero Trust, privacy and data protection, and network security.
• The licensing model is based on the number of users and/or assets with a B2B focus.
• Geographic focus includes France and the DACH region, with expansion planned across Europe.
• Snowpack emerged from the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA).
• The company has seed investment backing and support from ET Digital.
• Snowpack was recognized by i-Lab, i-Nov, and the National Cyber Strategy programs.
• In 2024, Snowpack received two prestigious French cybersecurity awards awarded by CISO juries.
• The overlay network spans 40+ nodes across seven European countries and is validated for worldwide expansion.

• “Snowpack operates at the intersection of multiple cybersecurity domains, challenging traditional market definitions with its unconventional ‘Beyond Trust’ approach.”
• “Its vision transcends established paradigms in network security, data protection, and Zero Trust architectures by eliminating the need to trust infrastructure altogether.”
• “Snowpack’s core innovation is a patented technology suite designed to render users, infrastructure, and services completely invisible online.”
• “Unlike conventional ZTNA solutions that still depend on trusted intermediaries or vendors, Snowpack’s architecture is designed to function without reliance on any trusted third parties, including itself.”
• “Data transmitted over this network is fragmented into anonymized packets (‘snowflakes’) which are then routed independently across multiple nodes.”
• “This fragmentation, combined with distributed exit nodes and collaborative IP spoofing, ensures that no single observer can reconstruct the full data stream or trace its origin and destination.”
• “The solution effectively eliminates open ports, visible endpoints, and metadata exposure, practically removing the entire attack surface.”
• “By offering a decentralized ‘brightnet’ (as an opposite to the traditional darknet) and fully independent security fabric, Snowpack goes beyond Zero Trust to operationalize what it terms ‘Beyond Trust’.”
• “Zero Trust, while a necessary step forward, still assumes visibility of resources and interaction points that can be exploited.”
• “By making users and services invisible, Snowpack sets a new benchmark for digital resilience.”