UPDATED 11:30 EDT / FEBRUARY 19 2020

SECURITY

SentinelOne raises $200M from VCs in latest big cybersecurity round

Less than a year after landing $120 million in funding from a consortium led by Insight Partners, SentinelOne Inc. today announced that it has closed an additional $200 million funding round also led by Insight.

Other existing SentinelOne backers participated as well, including Vista Equity Partners, Tiger Global, Qualcomm Inc.’s venture capital arm and The Westly Group.

SentinelOne, now valued at more than $1.1 billion thanks to the new round, provides an endpoint protection platform that has been adopted by more than 3,500 companies. The software is designed to work in a broad range of environments. SentinelOne says it can protect employee laptops, connected devices, public cloud deployments and containerized workloads, among other digital assets.

The platform is capable of handling a large variety of threats as well. According to SentinelOne, its algorithms catch not just regular malware but also fileless attacks that weaponize a company’s existing applications. The startup also promises protection against lateral movements, incidents where a hacker tries to use an already breached system to access other endpoints, as well as zero-day vulnerabilities not known to the cybersecurity community.

Like many competing products, SentinelOne uses artificial intelligence under the hood to catch malicious behavior. But whereas other platforms usually send data about potential threats to the cloud for evaluation, the startup’s software does the analysis locally on the device on which it’s running. That allows it to keep looking for threats even when there’s no internet connection. 

SentinelOne’s pitch of providing protection against a broad range of threats in a broad range of environments is evidently resonating with enterprises. The startup says its 3,500-plus customers include hundreds of Global 2000 firms and claims to have grown revenue by 104% in the past 12 months.

That’s lower than the 217% year-over-year sales jump SentinelOne reported after its previous funding round last year, but still represents a notable gain given the growth is from a bigger base. The company didn’t reveal absolute revenue numbers.

SentinelOne’s $200 million raise is the latest in a series of big-ticket funding rounds for cybersecurity startups. Earlier this month, Netskope Inc. raised $304 million from investors for its cloud security platform, while vulnerability detection provider Snyk Inc. joined the unicorn club in January thanks to a $150 million round  led by growth equity firm Stripes. 

Photo: SentinelOne

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