Today, we announced an additional $340 million investment, led by new world renowned investor Sequoia Capital Global Equities. New investors CPP Investment Board and PSP Investments participated, as well as all of our existing investors – Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Base Partners, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and Social Capital. It humbles and thrills our entire team and myself to think that Netskope, the fastest-growing security company, has now achieved a valuation of nearly $3 billion.
When we started Netskope in 2012, it was becoming clear that the cloud was changing everything, but few envisioned how it would disrupt security. We understood, however, that in the app-driven, mobile world that the cloud was enabling, the traditional, perimeter-focused notion of security would be rendered obsolete.
What was urgently needed was a new kind of cloud-driven architecture that could provide real-time protection against network and data threats in the modern digital enterprise where cloud services, websites, private apps, data lakes, and much more are being accessed from anywhere, anytime, on any device.
It was simply no longer an option for companies to try to get by with legacy defenses poorly equipped to deal with cloud-based attacks. We knew we could help them. It’s because of our customers — we now serve 25 percent of the Fortune 100 — that we’re so delighted to have built Netskope into the market leader.
We’ve established the Netskope Security Cloud Platform as the new gold standard in cloud security platforms, with 80 percent year-over-year growth in enterprise customers, and Netskope as the fastest-growing company in the fastest-growing areas of cybersecurity – secure access service edge (SASE) and cloud security.
We’ve worked hard to expand the breadth of our offerings and the long-term vision of our company by adding a range of next-generation technologies. Those include Netskope NewEdge, the globally distributed network that enables the Netskope cloud-native security platform to deliver real-time security without compromising performance; the industry’s only seamless integration and inline cloud-native Secure Web Gateway (SWG) solution; and the release of Netskope for Private Access, a cloud-based service for secure access to private enterprise applications in both the public cloud and the data center.
Netskope also has opened 26 new high-performance data centers just in the past nine months across the world to provide a globally distributed set of network, compute, and storage for all customers who use Netskope products. Built by the teams that built the world’s largest and most available networks, this enables the Netskope platform to deliver high-capacity, low-latency, real-time cloud security to protect enterprise data and applications anywhere on any device.
We’ve opened new worldwide offices in Paris, São Paulo, Seattle, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Tokyo and a new headquarters in Santa Clara. We’ve expanded internationally in Australia, Singapore, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, and Germany. We’ve grown our executive leadership with some of the top talent in the industry. And we’ve increased employee headcount by nearly 50 percent, with significant investments in engineering and sales.
Our momentum is a testament to the talent of our teams and people that I have the honor and privilege of working side by side with every day. And to the corporate culture that I’m extremely passionate about, one based on empowerment. At Netskope, we constantly feed an entrepreneurial spirit within the company by encouraging people to think and act creatively and strategically. I believe this culture is what’s allowed us to innovate and address shifting market demands more nimbly than any other security company.
I’m so proud of Netskope’s success and accomplishments, and of the enormous vote of confidence that this latest investment signifies. We look forward to using this investment to continue to accelerate global demand for the Netskope Security Cloud Platform and continue to push the envelope on our vision of a cloud-native platform that secures data against all threats across all of an enterprise’s traffic – whether destined for the web, the cloud, or private apps.
I want to thank our investors for partnering with us on this amazing journey, and again express my deep appreciation to the customers who have placed so much trust in us in reimagining what security means in the age of digital transformation.
I couldn’t be more excited about what the coming years hold for our company.
