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Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, round underscores company leadership in solving security challenges erupting in enterprises adopting digital-first models
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2018 – Netskope, the leader in cloud security, today announced the close of a $168.7M Series F funding round led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Accel, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Social Capital participated, in addition to new investor, Base Partners. Fueled by the vision to tackle the toughest enterprise security challenges, the investment will enable R&D and global data center expansion of the company’s leading enterprise security cloud platform. The round brings Netskope’s total amount raised to $400.1M.
The majority of enterprises — as many as 89 percent, according to IDG — have adopted a digital-first mindset to accelerate their businesses to operate more cost-effectively, deliver on-demand customer service, and accommodate a globalized workforce. To achieve this, businesses have turned to thousands of services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Box, Dropbox, Google G-Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Slack, and Workplace by Facebook — all of which are built using the new language of the internet and shift much of the administrative control away from IT. This has significantly increased the attack surface of all enterprises, leaving security teams without the means to protect these new threat vectors. As a result, enterprises are in need of a new approach as legacy security solutions were designed for a world where data and applications were placed in centralized data centers and IT teams were responsible for application selection and deployment.
Born in the cloud, Netskope empowers organizations to achieve the security transformation necessary to make the shift to a digital-first model. The Netskope Security Cloud is the only solution on the market that provides full visibility and control, best-of-breed DLP, and award-winning threat protection for SaaS, IaaS, and the web from one cloud architecture. For businesses, this provides the peace of mind that they are able to manage risk, protect data, and stop threats, irrespective of where, when, or how employees are doing their work.
“Simply put, without security transformation, digital transformation will fail,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO, Netskope. “We have spent the last six years bringing the leading security cloud to enterprises to address this growing challenge as more and more companies embrace digital transformation. With this new round of funding, we are one step closer to helping all organizations match their security strategy with the pace of today’s cloud-first world.”
This announcement comes on the heels of significant growth and momentum for the company. Netskope was recently named a leader for the second consecutive year in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers and included in Forbes 2018 Cloud 100 list of most valuable private cloud computing companies in the world for the second time and honored as a Coolest Cloud Vendor of 2018 by CRN for the third year in a row. In the past year, Netskope grew employee headcount by 50% and opened a new headquarters in Santa Clara, California to accommodate its growing staff. To support growing global demand, Netskope hired two new key executives, a vice president of corporate development, Dave Daetz, and General Counsel, Jim Bushnell.
“Transforming enterprise security is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement in order to protect and secure a company’s most important assets,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We have been fortunate to partner with many high-growth companies in the past such as AppDynamics, MuleSoft and Nutanix, and like those companies, Netskope consistently leads the market and is disrupting and transforming the industry landscape through solving some of the toughest enterprise challenges today. Since its launch, the company has continued to adapt to the evolving security landscape and bring innovative solutions to market.”
About Netskope
Netskope is the leader in cloud security. We help the world’s largest organizations take full advantage of the cloud and web without sacrificing security. Our patented Cloud XD technology eliminates blind spots by going deeper than any other security provider to quickly target and control activities across thousands of cloud services and millions of websites. With full control through one cloud-native interface, our customers benefit from 360-degree data protection that guards data everywhere and advanced threat protection that stops elusive attacks. Netskope — smart cloud security.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 350 companies globally, including Snap, The Honest Company, GrubHub, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, and MuleSoft. The firm currently manages over $6 billion of committed capital and invests in the U.S. and internationally, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India and China. www.lsvp.com
