Netskope, a cloud access security broker, has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E funding was led by its previous investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. Along with these two investment firms, Social Capital and Iconiq Capital also participated. In addition, two new investors who had not participated in any Netskope’s previous rounds of funding also contributed and they are Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.
According to a statement released by the company’s founder and CEO, Sanjay Beri, this additional round of funding would be used to building its customer base. In the previous round, Netskope released $938 million, thereby bringing the total money raised to $231.4 million
Netskope has been fairly successful in raising money for its activities, with the first round coming in 2013 and worth just a paltry $21 million. These funding rounds reflect the rapid strides Netskope has made over the last five years.
One of the biggest reasons could be the fact that cloud security is a booming industry. With growing use of devices, the many access points for an application is greatly increased. For example, let’s say you use an internal app to log in to your workplace and maybe even log time to it. You’re likely to see it from your desktop at work, your laptop at home and maybe even from your smartphone and tablet while on the move. This means, there are four access points to that app and a security vulnerability can come from any of it.
These multiple access points are one of the important reasons for the many hacking incidents we’ve seen over the last few years or so. Also, the emergence of different services such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and IDaaS are adding to security problems. To tackle the growing complexity of security head-on, Netskope has been working on a standalone security platform.
Existing systems and security practices don’t work well with cloud simply because it’s growing and becoming more integrated and complex by the day. This is why Netskope has come up with a unique principle that’s called “privacy by design.” This principle gives you the flexibility to track and identify specifically what you want such as a set of specific apps or documents instead of analyzing every bit of information that passes through your network, which is truly impossible. You can set keywords and create other security policies that will allow you to have a better control over your network and that’s exactly what Netskope aims to achieve with its platform. It has already secured this idea with more than a hundred patents.
That said, Netskope is not yet profitable and continues to depend on investors for its everyday operations. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much it’s able to translate its ideas into monetary value when it finally releases its platform to the world.
Until then, it’s a wait and watch game for investors and for the general public. There is also some skepticism in the industry circles about security products because none of them have really made the impact they claim to make. Let’s hope Netskope can change this barrier.
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