Netskope Secures Oversubscribed $401M Round

January 7, 2023

Netskope Touted their oversubscribed investment round of $401M. The partners for this oversubscribed convertible note investment were four of the world's premier investors. The financing was led by investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value, with participation from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and CPP Investments. Netskope plans to extend its technology and platform advantages and market reach through continued innovative worldwide platform development and expansion of strategic go-to-market activities, underscoring its leadership and momentum in what leading analysts estimate to be the $36 billion market opportunity for SASE by 2025.

This financing marks the latest among many recent business and financial milestones for Netskope and serves as another strong validation and indicator of the continued momentum and adoption of the company's vision, team, products, culture, and market opportunity.

Securing Modern Cloud Networks

As hybrid and remote work has become the new reality, and the use of the cloud accelerates, enterprises of all sizes need to transform their network and data security strategy and architecture. As a result, they are rapidly adopting SASE as a foundational part of their zero trust strategy, to safeguard data, support digital transformation efforts, and realize better efficiency by addressing security and networking challenges through a unified architecture. In addition, enterprises are increasingly seeking SASE capabilities from fewer sources to reduce vendor and tool sprawl. Gartner notes1 that, "by 2025, 65% of enterprises will have consolidated individual SASE components into one or two explicitly partnered SASE vendors, up from 15% in 2021."

The Netskope converged SASE platform includes Netskope's industry-leading Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE) and Borderless SD-WAN technologies, all of which are crucial to providing the optimized access and zero trust-based security required in a modern networking and security technology stack. Netskope today is one of only a few providers of single-vendor SASE. It is also the only SASE provider recognized as a representative vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide to Single Vendor SASE that also appears as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge.

"Our vision from day one was that traditional network and security perimeters would transform, with users, data, and devices moving outside the confines of corporate network perimeters and requiring a new approach to security," said Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO and co-founder. "With a cloud-first, data-first, and customer-centric philosophy, we built a market-leading SASE platform and one of the world's fastest and most-connected security cloud networks. We have enabled enterprises everywhere to allow their users to be mobile, efficient, and flexible while securing them and the data and applications they access, whether they are in the cloud, on the web, or are private applications on-prem and beyond. We are very proud of the team members, customers, industry luminaries, and existing and new partners announced today who are helping to enable Netskope's journey and secure the journey of all enterprises worldwide."

"Cloud migration—and securing this modern network—represents one of the most significant and transformative technology shifts in decades," said Pedro Teixeira, managing director of Morgan Stanley and Co-Head of Morgan Stanley's Tactical Value Investing Team. "We seek to invest in high-quality companies that are driving their markets today and into the future. Netskope epitomizes this, with its innovative SASE vision and solid execution, a robust platform with significant monetization ahead of it, a large global customer base, and defensible market leadership. We look forward to partnering with the team as they strive to realize the significant opportunity that lies ahead."

Legal Notices

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as the sole placement agent for the note offering. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP served as Netskope's legal counsel and Latham & Watkins LLP served as Morgan Stanley Tactical Value's counsel. J Wood Capital Advisors LLC acted as financial advisor to Netskope.