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Cato Networks Secures $55 Million Investment as Bookings Accelerate 352%, Year-Over-Year

January 29th, 2019

New round of financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners caps incredible 2018 with strong financial results, service innovation, and stellar customer growth

TEL AVIV, Israel, January 29, 2019 — Cato Networks, the cloud-native carrier, announced today an investment of $55M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with the participation of all current investors — Aspect Ventures, Greylock Partners, Singtel Innov8, USVP, and co-founders Shlomo Kramer and Gur Shatz. This investment brings the total funding raised to date to $125M. The new funding caps an incredible 2018 that saw bookings grow by 352% year-over-year with business from the channel increasing fivefold. Over 300 enterprises worldwide with thousands of branch locations across all verticals now rely on Cato to connect and secure their corporate networks.

Funding to Accelerate Cato’s Strategic Vision of the Cloud-native Carrier

The new funding demonstrates the investors’ confidence in Cato’s vision of a global, cloud-native carrier, connecting and protecting all enterprise locations, mobile users, and cloud resources.

“Cato is a transformative force in the stagnant managed network services market,” says Yoni Cheifetz, Partner at Lightspeed. “Businesses are looking for an affordable, agile, and scalable network to drive strategic initiatives like global expansion, hybrid cloud, and workforce mobility. Today’s rigid networks aren’t built to support this growth and this is the multi-billion dollar market opportunity Cato is going after.”

“We are excited to have Lightspeed join our journey to build the new network for the business,” said Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks. “Cato goes beyond edge SD-WAN, MPLS, and network security point solutions, to offer a full WAN transformation platform. Cato closes the huge gap between the needs of the digital business, and the rigid, slow, and expensive networks provided by legacy telcos, using a groundbreaking cloud-native carrier architecture. Cato is powered by cloud-scale software, self-service management, and elastic compute and bandwidth to provide the new foundation for the growth of the business.”

Cato Sees Massive Customer Growth Across Enterprises of All Sizes

Cato is seeing stellar growth in customer adoption. During 2018, Cato expanded its customer base to over 300 enterprises, signed up its first 1000-site organization, and added several enterprises with more than 30,000 employees. Select customers shared their Cato experiences:

  • Centrient Pharmaceuticals  (formerly DSM Sinochem Pharmaceuticals), a global pharmaceutical company, replaced its global MPLS network with Cato. “MPLS was about 4x more than Cato for a quarter of the bandwidth,” says  Matthieu Cijsouw, the Global IT Manager at Centrient, “With Cato Cloud, not only did I receive a more agile infrastructure, but I also received an agile partner who can keep up with my needs.  We operate faster because of Cato.”
  • Innovex Downhole Solutions, a worldwide leader in oil drilling, transformed its 20+ site MPLS network with Cato. “When we first heard the value proposition we thought, ‘This is too simple we’re missing something,’” says  Don Williams, Corporate IT Director at Innovex, “My network engineer and I kept wondering how can we get so much more for so much less?”

In addition, numerous enterprises attested to Cato’s value and simplicity as WAN edge infrastructure and managed SD-WAN services on Gartner PeerInsights.

Industry Analysts Acknowledge Cato’s Innovation

Analysts continued to recognize Cato for its industry-leading approach to WAN transformation in 2018:

  • Gartner, Inc positioned Cato in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure recommending that companies “Evaluate WAN as a service for your next refresh, even if you have traditionally pursued a DIY approach.”
  • International Data Corporation (IDC) profiled Cato in “Cato Networks: SD-Carrier of a New Generation.”
  • Ted Corbett and others included Cato in Gartner’s  Market Guide for Managed SD-WAN Services as a Non-NSP (non-carrier) provider of managed SD-WAN.

Cato’s Service Expands at Cloud Speed

During 2018, Cato expanded its global network to 42 Points of Presence (PoPs), the largest backbone of any independent SD-WAN provider.

Cato PoP
The Cato global network spans 42 PoPs

Cato also significantly expanded service capabilities in 2018. Specific enhancements included:

  • Cato Intelligent Last-Mile Management (ILMM) that offloads the burden of monitoring and troubleshooting customer last mile onto Cato. As part of the Cato ILMM effort, Cato invested in a state-of-the-art, Network Operations Center (NOC) with 24x7x365, follow-the-sun operation and more than quintupling of network operations personnel.
  • Cato Threat Hunting System (CTHS), the first threat hunting solution without dedicated and costly data collection infrastructure within the enterprise.
  • Self-healing capabilities that prevent downtime by automatically repairing network outages and updating relevant security policies.
  • Identity-aware routing, which abstracts policy creation from the network and application architecture, enabling business-centric routing policies based on user identity and group affiliation.
  • Multi-segment, policy-based routing enhancements, such as segment-specific protocol acceleration, for maximizing global throughput.
  • Real-time network analytics expanded Cato’s robust reporting and advanced troubleshooting capabilities.
  • Cato x1700 Socket, a rackable datacenter device with redundant power supplies and hot-swappable hard drives.