Netskope — Building the next Iconic Security Company
Almost five years ago in a small Palo Alto coffee shop, Sanjay Beri (founder and CEO of Netskope) talked me through an ambitious multi-step plan to build an iconic security company for the cloud era. Over a latte, he explained how more than $50B in public market capitalization would be up for grabs as enterprises shifted to a cloud-first model. If you want to get a VC’s attention, talk about tectonic shifts in massive markets!
Sanjay’s key insight was that the enterprise IT footprint would change dramatically over the next decade, which would present a new set of security challenges that incumbent vendors weren’t architected to address. Looking back, Sanjay was prescient, as many of his predictions have played out:
- Increasingly, SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Box, Office365 and ServiceNow (and 23,000+ other applications) are replacing on-premises software implementations.
- As a sign of how quickly enterprises are adopting the cloud, revenues from Amazon’s AWS business have grown to $12B in 2016 from $4B in 2012.
- And the pattern of how applications are built has shifted from a 3-tier monolithic model to one of APIs and microservices.
The result is that the traditional enterprise perimeter that security appliances from companies like Symantec, Cisco, Forcepoint and others were built to protect has rapidly eroded. The shift to the cloud has precipitated a new set of threats, including dangerous malware that now uses cloud services (many of which are well known and sanctioned by IT), innovative threats that are architected for cloud- or mobile-first attacks, and stealthy insider attacks that put critical assets at risk. Exciting and scary times!
What Netskope has built is simple to describe, but incredibly hard to build: a globally distributed cloud platform that provides visibility, analytics, control and enterprise class data loss protection for all of a company’s cloud assets. Netskope was the first company in the world to build and patent technology capable of decoding cloud transactions, the first to introduce enterprise-grade cloud data loss protections, and the first to provide real-time threat protection in the cloud. Netskope helped build a new Gartner category (CASB) that is now considered the number one security challenge that enterprise CISOs need to address.
Beyond technology, what is even more exciting is how Netskope’s platform is validated by an incredibly smart, innovative, and security-conscious set of customers. The Netskope cloud is now trusted by some of the world’s largest brands. Notably, three of the top five retailers, the largest hospital provider in the US, the world’s top auto manufacturer, and hundreds of other customers now trust Netskope to secure their cloud assets.
Today, we are proud and thrilled to co-lead (with our friends at Accel) Netskope’s $100M Series E financing. And while there’s still a lot of work ahead, we are incredibly excited about Netskope’s execution and the path they are forging towards building an enterprise cloud security platform and an iconic security company. Onwards!
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Ventures Partners. He brings significant networking, cloud, and security expertise to the Netskope board. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Arif worked in the Corporate Business Development group at Cisco Systems. Earlier in his career, Arif worked in technical development and product management roles at WebTV (acquired by MSFT), Andes Networks (acquired by SUNW), and Sun Microsystems.
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