Cato Networks valued at $3B after equity investment round

Recently, Cato Networks from Tel Aviv, secured a substantial investment worth $238M. This massive fund infusion has elevated the company's valuation to $3B. This latest round swells Cato’s total investment to $770M

• Background: Launched in 2015 by Shlomo Kramer, an experienced entrepreneur with a keen interest in cybersecurity, Cato aims to simplify and streamline network security. Kramer posits that the solution lies not in a multitude of separate tools, but rather in a single, comprehensive platform.

• Financiers: This windfall came from a consortium of investors including LightSpeed Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital, and Singtel Innov8.

• Expanding Horizons: According to Kramer, they intend to broaden its customer and partner ecosystem and a significant portion of the funding will go towards strengthening the company's engineering and product teams.

• Features: Cato's unique offering is a cloud-based mesh that facilitates business connections with network resources, irrespective of their geographical location.

• AI Powered: Cato employs AI to sift through over 250 threat intelligence feeds, filtering out irrelevant indicators. Moreover, the platform updates its cloud-wide blacklists every four hours without human intervention, using deep learning algorithms for threat prevention and malicious file detection. They also combine software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), meaning network and security controls are delivered directly to the source of connection.

• User Base: Cato has managed to carve out a sizable user base with over 670,000 remote users across more than 1,900 businesses and an annual recurring revenue exceeding $100M.

The company plans to expand its product offerings and global reach, and increase its headcount from 800 to over 900 employees by the end of the year.