Netskope Wins $100 Million in New Funding for Cyber Security Play

Cyber security is different in the age of cloud.

That’s the premise behind Netskope, the five-year-old security vendor created by Juniper Networks veteran Sanjay Beri, that aims to take on industry giants like Symantec.  

Today, as Netskope announced the securing of another $100 million in Series E funding, the company’s founder and CEO reflected on why he thinks the company’s technology is going to market at just the right time.

Beri

“Cloud has disrupted everything,” he said. “Security is no different; your traditional security products aren’t set up to (provide) visibility into what cloud does.”

The E Series round – which was oversubscribed – brings the company’s total funding to more than $230 million.

Beri offered the new mobile environment as an example of his technology’s utility.

The typical employee doesn’t log into a VPN to use a mobile device. Instead, they just instinctively use the technology to accomplish tasks, as in their personal lives.

That means different considerations for cyber security.

“The thought of the perimeter going away, those things really led us to look and understand these trends,” Beri said.

Increasingly, Beri says, enterprises are looking for a way to manage their IT environments with no data centers, no infrastructure and maximum cost efficiency.

That growing cloud adoption is driving demand for cloud-centric security solutions.

“We saw that the billions and billions of dollars that people were spending on their networks, was not made for that,” he said. “They were made for things that were (around) 10 to 15 years ago.”

Netskope’s technology is designed to provide maximum visibility across modern cloud environments, enabling sophisticated policy changes beyond “enable” or “block.”

“The unique thing about Netskope, what’s out there now, it might tell you that you have 500 cloud applications,” Beri said. “It means nothing.”

“Let’s say you use Box or Slack, it says there’s 100 KB of data going to AWS,” he went on. “If you run it to us, it will tell you ‘this is Joe on his private device and communicating on a private Slack channel and transmitting sensitive information.”

An end user’s ability to respond would be substantially different depending on which set of information is available.

“The tools out there right now are binary,” he went on. “They need to be very much nuanced. In that granularity, that’s the world we live in today.”

Clearly, Netskope’s technology is catching on.

The company saw a tripling of its annual revenue in 2016, meanwhile its customer list includes names like Levi’s, New York Life, Toyota and many other well-known multinationals.

That’s likely what attracted investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners to lead the latest round, aimed at funding advancement of the technology and a go-to-market strategy.

“Two of the most powerful enterprise investors are going all in on Netskope,” Beri said. “As we disrupt the market, it gives us a strong balance sheet which gives us independence.”

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