Cato Networks Partners to Benefit from $77 Million Funding Round

Cato Networks‘ funding is now over $200 million, with a $77 million funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It’s the company’s biggest to date.

The Israel-based company increased bookings by 220% last year. And it reported strong first-quarter 2020 earnings.

The new money will allow Cato to scale channel recruitment and enablement, and drive more joint marketing programs. So says Yishay Yovel, Cato Networks’ CMO.

Cato launched its partner program last November.

Cato’s Yishay Yovel

“Cato is a 100% channel-driven company,” Yovel said. “Our various channels, including the agents, VARs, distributors and MSPs, are driving the vast majority of won business.”

Cato Networks’ global cloud service connects and secures the entire enterprise, which includes remote users, sites, applications and clouds. The company implements Gartner’s secure access service edge (SASE) framework, which combines SD-WAN and network security for all enterprise edges into the cloud.

“Cato is uniquely positioned with a cloud-scale, work-from-home solution partners can position and sell today,” Yovel said. “Unlike legacy VPN solutions that can’t scale to the entire business, Cato’s SASE platform is ideal for supporting any number of users with full optimization and security on its global, cloud-native service. Partners can capture the urgent need to rapidly deploy remote access at scale using Cato.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cato Networks added clientless access to its software-defined perimeter (SDP) offer. The aim is to help enterprises accommodate more remote workers quickly and securely.

“Cato revolutionizes the way IT thinks about networking and security,” said Yoni Cheifetz, partner at Lightspeed. “The convergence of these two categories is a paradigm shift that completely transforms the IT cost-benefit model. It’s why Cato routinely displaces legacy telco services and appliance-based solutions in enterprises of all sizes. We believe Cato is uniquely positioned to disrupt the global market for security, networking and access with an architecture that is unmatched by any other solution available today.”