I hope all is well and that you and your family, friends, and teams are healthy and safe.
One of the core things that drives Netskopers is making a positive impact in the world. From protecting the largest healthcare companies in the world, to protecting the largest financial organizations, as they enable new ways of flexible working but are under constant attack as people try to steal their (i.e. your!) data, to powering the security of the largest e-commerce, manufacturing, and retail environments, to protecting midsize businesses, which are the lifeblood of many economies, and grappling with the new cyberwar climate… and so much more. It gives us all such great pride (and warms our hearts) that this team—Team Netskope—is making such an impact in the world today. And as every month and year goes by, that impact gets bigger and bigger.
Amidst that backdrop, we feel very fortunate to announce a new, oversubscribed round of investment at a valuation of $7.5 billion, led by our existing investor ICONIQ Capital and including participation from all our other major existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Base Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Geodesic Capital. This is something we are of course very proud to achieve, having not yet been in existence even a full decade. But I wanted to take a minute to tell you about the bigger story here, and why our relentless focus on our customers and our culture has created the kind of positive impact, growth, and attention we’re seeing in the market.
Less than a decade ago, I remember envisioning how the widespread use of cloud applications and enterprise internet access from anywhere would take hold in business a lot faster than many companies anticipated at the time. We didn’t call anything “SASE” then; that now-ubiquitous term came to the market much later. But the idea for what has since become known as SASE was remarkably similar to what we anticipated in 2012: in a cloud-first, work- anywhere world, security would need to become perimeterless and a virtual enterprise edge (or enterprise onramp to the Internet, cloud, and private apps, as we called it) would be needed. Our view was, and is, that security must be able to follow a company’s most important asset, its data, and be contextually aware enough to protect that data wherever and whenever it is accessed, all while maintaining fast network performance and preserving the user experience.
Years ago, what we now think of as legacy security and networking technologies were already struggling to keep up with this shift toward the cloud. Today, no amount of “SASE-washing” can retrofit old technology into solving security for a cloud-first environment. Some of the biggest and most impactful organizations in the world—including more than 30 of the Fortune 100—have helped validate our vision. They trust Netskope to protect their data and their people, and we are honored that our strength in SASE has been recognized by our customers and by the top analysts in the industry.
I still have the blank notepad on which the original vision for Netskope was drawn up. (Really, I still have it. Many would say my penmanship—or lack of it—is naturally encrypted!) I have always said that if you could ask for one thing when you build a company it would be that your destiny is controlled by your own execution—not outside market or industry factors, not your board or capital markets, not competitors. I am so proud of the Netskope team, and all of our customers and partners and investors, for helping ensure that our destiny is controlled by our own execution.
I offer my profound thanks to our investors and customers, and to every Netskope team member—all are big parts of what’s happening here. We’re just getting started.
Onwards and upwards!
