Santa Clara, Calif.: Versa Networks, the recognized leader of single-vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platforms, today announced it has secured additional financing of $120M. The pre-IPO round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Inc. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) also participated in the funding.

This new round of funding will enable Versa to expand go-to-market strategies and accelerate on its industry-leading SASE innovations to further cement its leadership position in the SASE market, while setting Versa on its planned IPO path.

“As the leader in SASE, the fastest growing security and networking category, and executing on SASE services for years, Versa is the only solution proven to deliver the industry’s leading and differentiated architecture for high performance and security,” said Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa Networks. “This funding will allow us to expand our go-to-market and accelerate new innovations that will further expand the market opportunity for us as a company.”

“We are excited to support the Versa team and its vision to drive innovation across cloud, data and network security,” said Matt Singer, Managing Director, BlackRock. “SASE represents an important and fast-growing market that is at the core of organizations’ digital transformation and Versa, with its unified, single-code based architecture, is well positioned to deliver mission critical value to its customers.”

According to Gartner, the SASE market is expected to grow to $15 billion in 2025, and 80 percent of enterprises will have a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access using a SASE architecture. Dell’Oro Group lists Versa as a SASE market share leader, while Gartner has identified Versa SASE as having the most SASE components out of all 56 vendors Gartner evaluated.

“Versa is an industry leader in driving SASE innovation and adoption,” said Cody Nenadal, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank. “We are excited to work with Versa and support their continued growth as they provide more organizations with the value of a fully integrated single-vendor SASE solution.”

Apurva Mehta, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Versa Networks, said, “We are the only company that offers a fully integrated single-vendor SASE solution. We saw this opportunity in the market coming more than five years ago, and since then have been providing enterprises around the world with a truly modern secure network. It is exciting that the rest of the industry now recognizes the real value and benefits that single-vendor SASE can provide.”

Kumar Mehta, Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer of Versa Networks, said, “Enterprises are waking up to the power of more efficient and integrated security and networking infrastructure for the expanding attack surface. Support from marquee name investors like BlackRock is a testament to not only our leading innovative technology, but to our ethos as a platform company. We look forward to working with BlackRock and all our investors as Versa enters this important pre-IPO phase of the business.”

Versa’s single-vendor SASE platform delivers best-of-breed functions that tightly integrate and deliver services via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both via VOS™ with a Single-Pass Parallel Processing architecture and managed through a single pane of glass. Versa delivers SASE services such as Secure SD-WAN, Next-Generation Firewall, Next-Generation Firewall as a Service, Unified Threat Management (UTM) including Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), and User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA). Versa’s single-vendor SASE platform goes above and beyond management console automation integration by providing the ability to integrate networks, points of presence, policy definitions, application definitions, agent logic, and data lakes.

Citi acted as exclusive advisor and placement agent to Versa in the transaction.

About Versa Networks

Versa Networks, the leader in single-vendor SASE platforms, delivers AI/ML-powered SSE and SD-WAN solutions. The platform provides networking and security with true multitenancy, and sophisticated analytics via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both to meet SASE requirements for small to extremely large enterprises and Service Providers. Thousands of customers globally with hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of users trust Versa with their mission critical networks and security. Versa Networks is privately held and funded by Sequoia Capital, Mayfield, Artis Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Comcast Ventures, BlackRock Inc., Silicon Valley Bank, Liberty Global Ventures, Princeville Capital, RPS Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners. For more information, visit https://www.versa-networks.com or follow Versa Networks on Twitter @versanetworks.