Cato Networks 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.
