Israel-based Cato Networks, which provides a single-vendor SASE (secure access service edge) platform has secured a whopping $238 million in equity investment. This is the largest financing round raised by Cato Networks to date and brings the total funding raised by the company to $773 million. Also, this upround values Cato Networks at over $3 billion.
This investment round was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners (that backed Wondermind, Portkey.ai, and Zluri) with the participation of Adams Street Partners, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital, and Singtel Innov8.
Cato Networks will use the new funds to scale its organisation 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.
Following the round, Ravi Mhatre, founder and managing director of LightSpeed Venture Partners, joined the Cato board. He said, “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,” said Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “Cato’s SASE platform uniquely enables organisations 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.”
Effective alternative to other SASE platforms
SASE promises an indisputable value to all enterprises with 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 an alternative to legacy and emerging approaches that fall short of delivering this outcome as enterprises struggle with skills, resources, and budget constraints.
Founded in 2015 by industry luminaries Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point Software and Imperva, and Gur Shatz, co-founder of Incapsula, Cato Network was built to deliver enterprise security and networking capabilities through a converged cloud service.
Cato Networks’ unique visibility into massive, real-time traffic volumes underpins existing and upcoming AI/ML capabilities to detect and respond to threats in real time. Its zero-touch deployment model is ideally suited to expand beyond the network to further increase its end-to-end visibility and control of all enterprise traffic.
More than 1,800 enterprise customers, including Carlsberg and the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E, trust Cato Networks with their mission-critical security and networking infrastructure, demonstrating the robustness of its platform and its ability to support complex business and technical requirements. In 2022, the company crossed the $100 million ARR mark, growing revenues at over 60% year-over-year.
