Cato Networks valued at over $1 billion, raises $130 million to extend SASE market leadership

Cato Network,the provider of the world’s first SASE platform, announced its largest funding round to date of $130M. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation of a new investor, Coatue, and existing investors, Greylock, Aspect Ventures / Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Shlomo Kramer. Before the round, Cato was valued at $1 billion, reflecting its strong leadership of the secure access service edge (SASE) market. The new funds further strengthen Cato’s financial position and will accelerate its SASE market and technology expansion strategy.

“SASE is the hottest area in IT, and this funding round further attests to Cato’s leadership of the SASE market,” says Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks. “Only the Cato Cloud was built from the ground up as a converged and cloud-based global SASE service.”

Widespread Market Adoption of the SASE Architecture Pioneered by Cato
SASE addresses the pressing need to reduce IT complexity by converging together networking and security capabilities into one global platform, improving security effectiveness and increasing agility while reducing operational costs.

“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”, says Yoni Cheifetz, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Cato connects and secures all enterprise edges — sites, mobile users, and cloud-resources — with one global cloud-native platform. This is the essence of a true SASE platform. Cato’s global, fully converged cloud-native platform distributed across more than 60 PoPs worldwide represents a massive industry lead.

By contrast, competitors are trying to retrofit and market legacy products and services as SASE platforms— a phenomenon that Gartner explicitly cautions about:

“There have been more than a dozen SASE announcements over the past 12 months by vendors seeking to stake out their position in this extremely competitive market. There will be a great deal of slideware and marketecture, especially from incumbents that are ill-prepared for the cloud-based delivery as a service model and the investments required for distributed PoPs. This is a case where software architecture and implementation matters.”
CT Bureau