Cloud security company Netskope has announced that it raised $168.7 million in a Series F round of funding led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Accel, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and Social Capital also participated. And new investor Base Partners also joined.
According to IDG, about 89% of enterprises have adopted a digital-first mindset to accelerate their businesses, operate more cost-effectively, deliver an on-demand customer service, and accommodate a globalized workforce. So businesses have turned to services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Box, Dropbox, Google’s G-Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Slack, and Facebook’s Workplace. As a result, this has increased the attack surface of enterprises and makes security teams more vulnerable without the ability to protect new threat vectors. And enterprises will need a new approach as legacy security solutions were designed for data and applications being centrally located in data centers.
“Simply put, without security transformation, digital transformation will fail,” said Netskope founder and CEO Sanjay Beri. “We have spent the last six years bringing the leading security cloud to enterprises to address this growing challenge as more and more companies embrace digital transformation. With this new round of funding, we are one step closer to helping all organizations match their security strategy with the pace of today’s cloud-first world.”
Netskope was born in the cloud and empowers organizations to achieve the security transformation that is necessary to make the shift to a digital-first model. And The Netskope Security Cloud is considered the only solution on the market that provides full visibility, control with a “best-of-breed” data loss prevention, and award-winning threat protection for SaaS, IaaS, and the web from one cloud architecture.
This past year, Netskope grew its employee headcount by 50% and the company opened new headquarters in Santa Clara, California due to rapid growth in staff. Netskope also hired Dave Daetz as VP of corporate development and Jim Bushnell as General Counsel.
With this funding round, Netskope plans to enable research and development and its global data center expansion of the company’s enterprise security cloud platform. And Netskope has raised a total of $400.1 million in funding total so far. This solution provides the peace of mind for businesses that they can manage risk, protect data, and prevent threats despite where or how their employees are working.
“Transforming enterprise security is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement in order to protect and secure a company’s most important assets,” added Lightspeed Venture Partners partner Arif Janmohamed. “We have been fortunate to partner with many high-growth companies in the past such as AppDynamics, MuleSoft and Nutanix, and like those companies, Netskope consistently leads the market and is disrupting and transforming the industry landscape through solving some of the toughest enterprise challenges today. Since its launch, the company has continued to adapt to the evolving security landscape and bring innovative solutions to market.”
