Cato Networks Raises $238M in Equity Investment at Over $3B Valuation
The leading SASE platform’s largest financing round to date brings total funding to $773M
Cybertech
| 23/09/2023
Shlomo Kramer. Photo credit: Eclipse Media
Cato Networks, provider of the leading single-vendor SASE platform, announced it raised $238M in equity investment, bringing total funding to $773M. This round, led by LightSpeed Venture Partners, comes just weeks after adding Carlsberg as a major enterprise customer.
Following the round, Ravi Mhatre, founder and managing director of LightSpeed Venture Partners, will join the Cato board. “Lightspeed has a proven track record of supporting innovative companies that successfully disrupted and transformed huge legacy markets,” says Mhatre. “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.”
“This funding round reflects investor confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market,” says Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “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.”
Cato will use the new funds to scale its organization in three key areas: delivering Cato’s vision and customer success to a broader audience, expanding the partner ecosystem offering managed Cato SASE services, and growing the engineering and product team in charge of our high-velocity train of innovative capabilities.
Market Adopts Single-vendor SASE Architecture Pioneered by Cato
Founded 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.
This vision inspired the creation of the SASE category four years later. SASE promises 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 having to “own” the underlying infrastructure. Cato’s SASE stands as a glaring 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 has been met with enthusiasm in the market. In 2022, 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.
More than 1,800 enterprise customers 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. On Gartner Peer Insights™, IT leaders give high marks for the Cato Experience
Looking ahead, 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. Its 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.
The leading SASE platform’s largest financing round to date brings total funding to $773M
Shlomo Kramer. Photo credit: Eclipse Media
Cato Networks, provider of the leading single-vendor SASE platform, announced it raised $238M in equity investment, bringing total funding to $773M. This round, led by LightSpeed Venture Partners, comes just weeks after adding Carlsberg as a major enterprise customer.
Following the round, Ravi Mhatre, founder and managing director of LightSpeed Venture Partners, will join the Cato board. “Lightspeed has a proven track record of supporting innovative companies that successfully disrupted and transformed huge legacy markets,” says Mhatre. “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.”
“This funding round reflects investor confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market,” says Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “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.”
Cato will use the new funds to scale its organization in three key areas: delivering Cato’s vision and customer success to a broader audience, expanding the partner ecosystem offering managed Cato SASE services, and growing the engineering and product team in charge of our high-velocity train of innovative capabilities.
Market Adopts Single-vendor SASE Architecture Pioneered by Cato
Founded 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.
This vision inspired the creation of the SASE category four years later. SASE promises 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 having to “own” the underlying infrastructure. Cato’s SASE stands as a glaring 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 has been met with enthusiasm in the market. In 2022, 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.
More than 1,800 enterprise customers 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. On Gartner Peer Insights™, IT leaders give high marks for the Cato Experience
Looking ahead, 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. Its 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.
