Cato Networks – a provider of the world’s leading single-vendor SASE platform – recently announced it raised $238 million in equity investment, bringing total funding to $773 million. LightSpeed Venture Partners led the funding round with the participation of Adams Street Partners, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital, and Singtel Innov8.
This funding round comes just weeks after adding Carlsberg as a major enterprise customer, the company’s recognition as a ZTE/SASE Leader by Forrester Research, and as a Challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Single-vendor SASE. This up-round valuation also underscores investor confidence in Cato’s massive market opportunity and its SASE platform’s disruptive and transformative power.
Cato will use the new funding round to scale its organization in three key areas
1.) Delivering Cato’s vision and customer success to a broader audience
2.) Expanding the partner ecosystem offering managed Cato SASE services
3.) Growing the engineering and product team in charge of our high-velocity train of innovative capabilities.
Launched in 2015 by industry luminaries Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point Software and Imperva, and Gur Shatz, co-founder of Incapsula, Cato was built to deliver enterprise security and networking capabilities through a converged cloud service. And this vision inspired the creation of the SASE category four years later. SASE offers an indisputable value to all enterprises: the ability to use a world-class security infrastructure converged with a global private backbone for the entire business without owning the underlying infrastructure. Plus, Cato’s SASE stands as a solid alternative to legacy and emerging approaches that fall short of delivering this outcome as enterprises struggle with skills, resources, and budget constraints.
Cato’s vision was met with enthusiasm in the market. Last year, the company crossed the $100 million ARR mark, growing revenues at over 60% year-over-year. Cato’s gross dollar retention rate of over 95% is a strong testament to the improvements in security, agility, and performance experienced by our customers. Over 1,800 enterprise customers, including Carlsberg and the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E, trust Cato with their mission-critical security and networking infrastructure, demonstrating the robustness of Cato’s platform and its ability to support complex business and technical requirements.
In the future, Cato will expand its cloud-first, globally distributed secure network platform to deliver new security and networking capabilities without increasing the customer’s total cost of ownership. And Cato’s unique visibility into massive, real-time traffic volumes underpins existing and upcoming AI/ML capabilities to detect and respond to threats in real-time. Plus, Cato’s zero-touch deployment model is ideally suited to expand beyond the network to further increase Cato’s end-to-end visibility and control of all enterprise traffic.
In connection with the funding round, LightSpeed Venture Partners founder and managing director Ravi Mhatre will join the Cato board.
KEY QUOTES:
“Lightspeed has a proven track record of supporting innovative companies that successfully disrupted and transformed huge legacy markets. I am excited to join Cato’s board of directors to help guide the company towards its next phase of growth as it continues to expand its product offerings and scales global sales, marketing, and branding.”
— LightSpeed Venture Partners founder and managing director Ravi Mhatre
“This funding round reflects investor confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market. Cato’s SASE platform uniquely enables organizations of all sizes to optimally secure their businesses without the cost, complexity, and risk of owning and maintaining a pile of point solutions. Cato provides the only SASE platform creating a seamless customer experience and empowers IT to move at the speed of business.”
— Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks
