Cato Networks Raises $238M in Equity Investment at Over $3B Valuation

TEL AVIV, Israel — Cato Networks, provider of the world’s leading single-vendor SASE platform, announced it raised $238M in equity investment, bringing total funding to $773M. The largest financing round to date was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners with the participation of Adams Street Partners, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital, and Singtel Innov8. The round comes just weeks after adding Carlsberg as a major enterprise customer, Cato’s recognition as a ZTE/SASE Leader by Forrester Research, and as a Challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Single-vendor SASE. This up-round’s valuation underscores investor confidence in Cato’s massive market opportunity and its SASE platform’s disruptive and transformative power.  

Following the round, Ravi Mhatre, founder and managing director of LightSpeed Venture Partners, will join the Cato board. “Lightspeed has a proven track record of supporting innovative companies that successfully disrupted and transformed huge legacy markets,” says Mhatre. “I am excited to join Cato’s board of directors to help guide the company towards its next phase of growth as it continues to expand its product offerings and scales global sales, marketing, and branding.” 

“This funding round reflects investor confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market,” says Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “Cato’s SASE platform uniquely enables organizations of all sizes to optimally secure their businesses without the cost, complexity, and risk of owning and maintaining a pile of point solutions. Cato provides the only SASE platform creating a seamless customer experience and empowers IT to move at the speed of business.” 

Cato will use the new funds to scale its organization in three key areas: delivering Cato’s vision and customer success to a broader audience, expanding the partner ecosystem offering managed Cato SASE services, and growing the engineering and product team in charge of our high-velocity train of innovative capabilities. 

Market Adopts Single-vendor SASE Architecture Pioneered by Cato  

Founded in 2015 by industry luminaries Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point Software and Imperva, and Gur Shatz, co-founder of Incapsula, Cato was built to deliver enterprise security and networking capabilities through a converged cloud service. This vision inspired the creation of the SASE category four years later. SASE promises an indisputable value to all enterprises: the ability to use a world-class security infrastructure converged with a global private backbone for the entire business without having to “own” the underlying infrastructure. Cato’s SASE stands as a glaring alternative to legacy and emerging approaches that fall short of delivering this outcome as enterprises struggle with skills, resources, and budget constraints.  

Cato’s vision has been met with enthusiasm in the market. In 2022, the company crossed the $100 million ARR mark, growing revenues at over 60% year-over-year. Cato’s gross dollar retention rate of over 95% is a strong testament to the improvements in security, agility, and performance experienced by our customers. 

More than 1,800 enterprise customers, including Carlsberg and the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E, trust Cato with their mission-critical security and networking infrastructure, demonstrating the robustness of Cato’s platform and its ability to support complex business and technical requirements. On Gartner Peer Insights™, IT leaders give high marks for the Cato Experience. As of 11 September 2023, the Cato SASE Cloud had the highest overall rating of any rated single-vendor SASE platform (4.7 out of 5) based on 10x more reviews than any other vendor in the Single-Vendor SASE market.   

“Cato Networks is the poster child for ZTE and SASE,” writes Forrester Research in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Edge Solutions Q3 2023 Report. “Founded by Shlomo Kramer of Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva fame, Cato Networks started with a strong security pedigree and built a global platform of distributed PoPs from which to deliver security as a service. Cato has a strong strategy paired with a truly unified networking and security solution and has shown real security innovation within its single-pass architecture platform.” 

Looking ahead, Cato will expand its cloud-first, globally distributed secure network platform to deliver new security and networking capabilities without increasing the customer’s total cost of ownership. Cato’s unique visibility into massive, real-time traffic volumes underpins existing and upcoming AI/ML capabilities to detect and respond to threats in real time. Cato’s zero-touch deployment model is ideally suited to expand beyond the network to further increase Cato’s end-to-end visibility and control of all enterprise traffic.