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When we started Netskope five years ago, the cloud access security broker (CASB) market was just getting started. Talking to CIOs and CISOs about their cloud adoption in those early days, it felt like we were speaking a different language. They certainly weren’t “in the cloud” and the notion that there were hundreds of “shadow” cloud services in use was met with at least one raised eyebrow. Fast-forward to today, and CASB is considered the fastest-growing security segment and the top security priority for enterprises according to Gartner. Customers today approach CASB with a knowledge of use cases, and a solid understanding of who the best vendors are in the market.
Today, I am delighted to announce that Netskope has closed a $100 million Series E funding round led by existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. Existing investors Social Capital and Iconiq Capital also participated in the round, as did new investors Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital. This milestone not only validates the massive market opportunity ahead of Netskope, but also underscores our unique ability to execute, innovate, and dominate the cloud security space.
Looking back at these past five years, Netskope has constantly set the leadership bar for CASB, through the most comprehensive granular visibility and control for cloud services – sanctioned and unsanctioned, the only solution deployed at scale for real-time policies and action, the ability to comprehensively address the mobile and remote work environment, industry leading and award-winning DLP and cloud threat protection functionality, and the ability to address the core use cases that other vendors architectures were simply not designed and architected for. From a business perspective, these years are chronicled by our achievement in defining a business model for SaaS-delivered security in a space closely tethered to hundreds of other “as a service” offerings. This has been powered by a team that keeps me humbled through their sheer technical, go-to-market, and operational prowess that is only surpassed by a commitment to customers and a company culture that is at the core of Netskope. This last part often goes overlooked on balance sheets, but I’ll say it right here — Netskope’s culture of openness, transparency, collaboration, no egos, and innovation is its most valuable asset.
In addition to the funding news, I’m also happy to share how we will continue to advance our cloud security platform in the coming years. This expansion ties into our original thesis — that the exponential growth of cloud would lead to a complete transformation of the enterprise. We knew that the traditional security industry would stay glued to the concept of a network perimeter, even though such a concept is obsolete in a world where people access information from on-premises and remote locations and often from a combination of desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, enabling transactions to seamlessly traverse the network, cloud, and web across any endpoint.
Today, most traditional security vendors address the challenge of information seamlessly traversing the network, cloud, and web across any endpoint in silos and can’t look deep enough into transactions to see the bigger picture. This results in an incomplete contextual understanding and multiple weaknesses in enterprises that must be addressed, and to do that, you need a cloud security platform for the enterprise.
The first cornerstone capability of a cloud security platform is a cloud access security broker and we have established our leadership through award-winning innovation and customers who represent the top of their respective industries around the globe. In addition to CASB, the Netskope cloud security platform will soon address web content through what we’re calling “Netskope for Web.” Netskope for Web will harness the patented Netskope Context Engine to drive smarter decisions and bring governance and security of cloud and web into a unified console and delivered through our cloud-native platform.
Netskope for Web is just one example of the advances we’re making with our cloud security platform. More details about Netskope for Web will be available when we launch it later this year. As we look forward to that launch, it goes without saying that our top priority is our customers and ensuring that we enable them to successfully take on the myriad security challenges they are faced with today. As a company, we will seize on the fact that legacy security vendors have failed to address many of those challenges and take advantage of the incredible market opportunity we have in front of us.
As a final thought, I want to thank the customers who have trusted us to secure their use of the cloud. The journey to the cloud is all encompassing — and we look forward to continuing that journey with you!
