The funding propels Netskope’s valuation to nearly $3 billion.

Netskope, the California-based company founded by Sanjay Beri, announced its raising of $ 340 million in a Series G round. The round was led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities. (Crunchbase)

The round saw participation by all existing investors namely Lightspeed Venture Partners (which led its Series F), Accel, Base Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Geodesic Capital and Social Capital.

Furthermore, New investors in the current round were Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and PSP Investments.

Netskope had achieved unicorn status in November 2018 when it raised $ 168.7 million in its Series F funding round. Therefore, the current G round of funding takes the company’s aggregate cumulative funding to about $ 740 million.

Netskope’s cloud protection

“When we started Netskope in 2012, it was clear that the cloud was changing everything, but few saw how it would disrupt security,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO of Netskope in a statement. “Since inception, we have always focused on architecting a true cloud platform that, over time, will secure and govern all of an enterprise’s traffic as the perimeter evolves into a new high-performance worldwide cloud edge. This latest investment from the top enterprise and security investors in the world is proof of not only our enormous success in establishing Netskope as the new gold standard for cloud-delivered security but also that the astounding level of global demand we see today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Netskope’s cloud security platform provides enterprises with visibility, real-time insights, and threat protection across cloud services. The company delivers data-centric security (“reimagine your perimeter”) from one of the world’s largest and fastest security networks.

Solid growth metrics

The company enjoys solid growth. It reported 80% year over year growth in the number of customers. A quarter of these were Fortune 100 companies. Over the last year, employee headcount has grown by nearly 50%. New offices opened in Paris, São Paulo, Seattle, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Tokyo, and a new headquarters in Santa Clara.

IPO?

“We did not necessarily need this level of capital but having a large balance sheet and a legendary set of investors like Sequoia, Lightspeed and Accel putting all their chips behind Netskope  for the long term to dominate the largest market in security is a very strong signal to the industry,” Beri told TechCrunch.

When VentureBeat quizzed Beri on an IPO, Beri replied: “We’ve always had the vision of becoming an iconic security company and IPO is a possible milestone in the journey, but it’s certainly not limited to that and we’re not in a rush, so we’re not commenting on timing.”

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