Cloud security firm Netskope is dope with $168m funding
It feels like the amount of money is infinite in fintech as American cloud security firm Netskope has closed a $168.7 million Series F funding round led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The round brings its total amount raised to $400.1m
Existing investors Accel, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Social Capital participated, in addition to new investor, Base Partners.
Netskope is full of hope as it says the investment will enable R&D and global data centre expansion of its platform. The round brings its total amount raised to a whopping $400.1 million.
“Simply put, without security transformation, digital transformation will fail,” says Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO, Netskope. “We have spent the last six years bringing the leading security cloud to enterprises to address this growing challenge as more and more companies embrace digital transformation.”
The firm has a diverse range of customers. Some are non-fintech, such as Levi’s or the US National Hockey League (NHL). Relevant names include ICAP and Silicon Valley Bank.
As most of us know, Netskope reminds us that the majority of companies “have adopted a digital-first mindset to accelerate their businesses”.
To achieve this, it says businesses have turned to thousands of services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Box, Dropbox, Google G-Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Slack, and Workplace by Facebook – all of which are built using the new language of the internet and shift much of the administrative control away from IT.
It reckons this has “significantly increased the attack surface of all enterprises, leaving security teams without the means to protect these new threat vectors”. As a result, it wants to step in and grab a share of the cloud security market.
Things are moving well for the firm. In the past year, Netskope states that it grew employee headcount by 50% and opened a new headquarters in Santa Clara, California to accommodate its growing staff.
It also hired two new executives, a vice-president of corporate development, Dave Daetz, and general counsel, Jim Bushnell.
