Cato: The Rise of the Next-Generation Networking and Security Platform

Today, we announced our largest funding round to date ($238M) at a new company valuation of over $3B. It’s a remarkable achievement that is indicative not only of Cato’s success but also of a broader change in enterprise infrastructure.  

We live in an era of digital transformation. Every business wants to be as agile, scalable, and resilient as AWS (Amazon Web Service) to gain a competitive edge, reduce costs and complexity, and delight its customers. But to achieve that goal, enterprise infrastructure, including both networking and security, must undergo digital transformation itself. It must become an enabler, instead of a blocker, for the digital business. Security platforms are a step in that direction.  

Platforms can be tricky. A platform, by definition, must come from a single vendor and should cover most of the requirements of a given enterprise. This is not enough, though. A vendor could seemingly create a platform by “duct taping” products that were built organically with others that came from acquisitions. In that case, while the platform might check all the functional boxes, it would not feel like a cohesive unity but a collection of non-integrated components. This is a common theme with acquisitive vendors: they provide the comfort of sound financials but are hard pressed to deliver the promised platform benefits. What they have, in fact, is a portfolio of products, not a platform.  

In 2015, Cato embarked on a journey to build a networking and security platform, from the ground up, for the cloud era. We did not want just to cover as many functional requirements as fast as possible. Rather, we wanted to create a seamless and elegant experience, powered by a converged, global, cloud-native service that sustains maximal security posture and optimal performance, while offloading unproductive grunt work from IT professionals. A cohesive service architecture that is available everywhere enabled us to ensure scalable and resilient secure access to the largest datacenters and down to a single user.  

We have been hard at work over the past eight years to mature this revolutionary architecture, that Gartner called SASE in 2019, and rapidly expand the capabilities it offered to our 2,000+ customers. We have grown not only the customer base, but the scale and complexity of enterprises that are supported by Cato today. In the process of transforming and modernizing our customers’ infrastructure we replaced many incumbent vendors, both appliance-centric and cloud-delivered, that our customers could not find the skills and resources to sustain.  

Building a new platform is ambitious. Obviously, we are competing for the hearts and minds of customers that must choose between legacy approaches they lived with for so long, the so-called “known evil,” or join us to adopt a better and more effective networking and security platform for their businesses.  

Today’s round of financing is proof that we are going in the right direction. Our customers, with tens of thousands of locations and millions of users, trust us to power their mission critical business operations with the only true SASE platform. They are joined today by existing and new investors that believe in our vision, our roadmap, and in our mission to change networking and security forever.  

SASE is the way of the future. We imagined it, we invested in it, we built it, and we believe in it.  

Cato. We ARE SASE.