From Our First Check to IPO — SentinelOne is Now Public on the NYSE
Today is a special day for us at UpWest, as our portfolio company SentinelOne — where we were the first check in 2013 and strong believers from Day Zero — officially IPOed on the NYSE under the ticker “S”. This marks the first IPO from the UpWest portfolio. We continue to be impressed by what Tomer and his team have achieved over the years: building SentinelOne to be the world’s first autonomous cybersecurity platform using behavioral AI to detect and remediate malware across all endpoints.
SentinelOne’s journey to IPO is remarkable and we are proud to have had a front row seat in funding and supporting what was then a two-person team (Tomer and Almog) and is now a global company that has scaled its operations to over 1,000 employees worldwide serving thousands of customers. This is only the beginning.
Early days — From Tel Aviv to Silicon Valley
One of the privileges we have at UpWest is meeting founders super early in their journey. In SentinelOne’s case we met Tomer and Almog in the summer of 2013. They had a big vision but very few lines of code. They were bold, fearless and scrappy. We couldn’t help noticing their high conviction to disrupt the antivirus market. They believed that the next generation of solutions would be autonomous and rely heavily on machine learning, which ultimately turned out to be what differentiated them in a very competitive endpoint security market.
Tomer and Almog weren’t tied up to any previous mantra of how to build a company. They were eager to pave their own path. It was clear to them that Silicon Valley is where they want to get all their answers from customers and industry experts. With pre-seed funding from UpWest along with our help and robust network, Tomer immersed himself in the CEO role, moved to Silicon Valley and met with anyone who was willing to listen. We mobilized our network of customers among them: Yahoo!, Oracle, Netflix and Box. UpWest also assisted Tomer in navigating unfamiliar ground while raising his first institutional round. We introduced him to the investors that ultimately followed us and led the round, among them Dan Scheinman, Matt Ocko, and Sameet Metha. Dan is still on the board of SentinelOne today.
Mastering the narrative and staying focused on execution
A big part of an early stage founder’s role is to clearly articulate the opportunity and align the vision with the company’s solution. Tomer is an incredible storyteller. He crafted the message and path of SentinelOne setting very ambitious goals, but also staying grounded and focused on execution and excellence.
Long Journey Without Shortcuts
SentinelOne went through a long eight-year journey, which demanded resilience, focus, conviction and also a bit of luck. Tomer leveraged UpWest’s network in Silicon Valley to penetrate the US cybersecurity market. As a small startup, Tomer had the privilege to cooperate with giants to test his product and thus understand how US customers view the problem he aimed to solve. SentinelOne was built for this long journey, and its success is a product of continuous hard work. Tomer managed to bring the best minds in the cybersecurity industry and built a world-leading engineering team, with hundreds of engineers in Tel Aviv. For years, SentinelOne’s team has remained at the forefront of innovation producing cutting-edge products, so it came as no surprise when the company was recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms.
Growing together
When Tomer moved to Silicon Valley, UpWest became his first family. Throughout the years, he remained an important part of UpWest’s growing community of 300+ founders. Serving as a mentor, an advisor and an investor in some of our portfolio companies.
We grew UpWest alongside SentinelOne, and in many ways, we share the same startup mentality and core values of resilience, tenacity, trust and community. SentinelOne’s recognition as an outstanding workplace reflects its strong company culture: it was named as one of the ten best cybersecurity companies to work for in 2020 by Glassdoor, and recognized as one of the Disruptor 50 companies in 2020 and 2021 by CNBC.
It was clear that the SentinelOne team had the long game attitude about winning in their market. With fierce competition but a clear technological edge and differentiation, their story evolved as new cybersecurity challenges emerged in our world. Today they secure their customers at every endpoint, every device, cloud, or network.
Eight years together, it’s been a tremendous learning experience for us, strengthening our continued belief in Israeli founders.
Congratulations from all of us at UpWest on a successful journey to date.
