Cato Claims Unicorn Status in Wake of $130M Funding Round

Secure access service edge (SASE) vendor Cato Networks claimed unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion after raking in $130 million in its largest funding round to date. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Coatue, and long-time investors Greylock, Aspect Ventures, Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Cato CEO and founder Shlomo Kramer also made contributions. Secure access service edge (SASE) vendor Cato Networks claimed unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion after raking in $130 million in its largest funding round to date. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Coatue, and long-time investors Greylock, Aspect Ventures, Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Cato CEO and founder Shlomo Kramer also made contributions. “SASE is the hottest area in IT, and this funding round further attests to Cato’s leadership of the SASE market,” Kramer said. The Tel Aviv, Israel-based network and security company has raised more than $332 million since it was founded in early 2015. This funding has helped Cato capture in excess of 650 enterprise customers with more than 7,000 locations and 200,000 users, in 100 countries around the world. Today’s funding round comes about six months since the company announced $77 million in Series D funding. Cato claims to be one of the first to achieve what Gartner calls SASE, a platform that pairs elements of SD-WAN, managed security, and edge compute into a single cloud-managed package. While Gartner coined the product description in August 2019, Cato says it has been working to converge security and networking from the very beginning using its Cato Cloud platform, which now has more than 60 points of presence around the globe. “We are still the first and only pure SASE platform that was built from the ground up,” said Kramer. However, Cato isn’t alone. Since SASE’s inception in Gartner’s 2019 Hype Cycle report, multiple large security and SD-WAN vendors — Palo Alto Networks, VMware, Fortinet, Cisco, and Versa, to name just a handful — have claimed a SASE platform. The result is a market that analysts say could be worth $5 billion by 2024. However, it appears Cato’s investors expect the market to transform into something even larger. “SASE will transform the multi-billion-dollar markets for enterprise networking and security, and we believe Cato will lead this transformation. Cato’s architecture is purposely built to enable IT to support current and future business requirements such as the need to dynamically support secure and optimized work from anywhere,” said Yoni Cheifetz, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. Moving forward, Kramer said the additional funding will enable the company to expand its footprint to address a larger chunk of the addressable market. This will include the hire of approximately 130 people over the next year.