Netskope Raises $35M in Series C Funds, Targets European Expansion

Netskope, a cloud security services and solutions provider, has raised $35 million in a Series C funding round led by venture and growth equity firm Accel Partners.

Netskope’s Active Platform is designed to provide deep analytics to help decision-makers create policies without putting sensitive data at risk, the company said.

To date, this company has raised $56.4 million. It said that the most recent round of $35 million is earmarked for  marketing, research and development, sales and support teams. Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri said he believes the new investment validates his company’s approach to cloud security.

“Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen tremendous demand as more and more CIOs and CISOs alike recognize that cloud and SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications are literally taking over and that the business processes that run on these services have graduated well beyond ‘nice to have,’ and in many cases, are considered business-critical,” Beri wrote in a blog post.

In addition, Netskope announced Eric Wolford, a partner at Accel Partners, has joined its board of directors.

“We’re simply delighted to have Eric join the Netskope board,” Beri said. “It was gratifying to discover that we were of [the] same mind when it came to fueling Netskope’s growth and solving the challenges our customers are facing. And not only did we have this same philosophy, we also had a very good meeting of the minds when it came to the trajectory of the company and the market.”

Netskope expects to add 100 employees and expand its European presence by the end of the year, and Wolford said he believes Netskope will be a major player in the cloud access and security broker market going forward.

“Shadow IT is big and growing fast, with IT leaders discovering cloud usage 10 times greater than what they had thought or approved. While a significant threat to the business, shadow IT represents a huge opportunity to propel the business forward and to gain significant IT leverage,” Wolford said in a prepared statement.