As enterprises continue to move more of their computing to the cloud, and across an ever-expanding range of devices from computers to phones and tablets and more, hackers continue to find ways to break into those systems — resulting an unprecedented number of breaches globally. Now, one of the more prominent security startups has raised a significant round of funding to help tackle this issue head-on.
Netskope — a cloud-access security broker that has developed a platform to monitor a company’s disparate apps and devices, and set security policies to identify and prevent breaches — has raised $100 million in new funding.
The Series E was led by previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners, with Social Capital and Iconiq Capital also participating. The round also includes two new backers, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.
Netskope is not revealing its valuation in this round, but Sanjay Beri, its founder and CEO, said in an interview the other day that “it’s a significant upround” that the company will use to continue building out its team and customer base. He also said it’s likely to be its final venture funding round.
“We may never need to raise per se again,” he said. “Netskope has been clear since the beginning that our goal is to build a standalone, iconic security company and our plan is to remain standalone and on the IPO path.” For what it’s worth, one site that tracks venture funding in startups estimates that its pre-money valuation was around $938 million. It brings the total raised to date by Netskope to $231.4 million.
We first wrote about Netskope back in 2013, when the company was just coming out of stealth with some $21 million in funding (from Social Capital and Lightspeed). At the time, enterprises were starting to move to cloud services and apps, although it…