In collaboration with Cato Networks
When Cato Networks CEO Shlomo Kramer founded the company a decade ago, he wanted to do more than patch the holes in corporate cybersecurity. He wanted to rebuild it from the ground up.
Now, with $359 million in fresh funding and a valuation north of $4.8 billion, the Tel Aviv-based company is staking its claim as one of the most important players in the next wave of AI-powered security and networking.
The round, announced Monday, was led by big-name investors like Vitruvian Partners and ION Crossover Partners, with long-time backers like Lightspeed also piling in—proof that Cato’s vision of simplifying complex security architecture is resonating in a world where attacks are only getting smarter.
Cato’s big idea?
Scrap the patchwork of legacy firewalls, routers and proxies that companies have been duct-taping together for years and replace them with a single, cloud-native platform that handles both networking and security—what analysts now call Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE.
Get the Ynetnews app on your smartphone: Google Play: https://bit.ly/4eJ37pE | Apple App Store: https://bit.ly/3ZL7iNv
But for Kramer, who’s no stranger to cybersecurity success (he also co-founded Check Point Software), that wasn’t enough. Cato has spent the last decade weaving artificial intelligence into its platform, not just to automate rote tasks but to help companies detect and respond to threats in real time, with what Kramer describes as “actionable live data, not outdated reports.”
The timing couldn’t be better.
Businesses everywhere are under pressure to adopt AI while simultaneously struggling with more complex, fragmented infrastructure and a chronic shortage of cybersecurity talent. Investors see Cato as perfectly positioned to capitalize on this chaos.
"Legacy infrastructure has become a liability," Vitruvian Partners said of its decision to back the company. And the numbers back it up: while Gartner forecasts the SASE market will grow at a healthy 26% annually through 2028, Cato reported 46% year-over-year growth in 2024, outpacing even the bullish analyst projections.
Cato says it will use the new funding to double down on R&D, expand globally, and deepen its AI capabilities to secure everything from IoT devices to cloud apps. For Kramer, though, the mission remains the same as it was in 2015: giving IT and security teams something they’ve long been denied—simplicity.
“With Cato, AI handles the noise so our customers can focus on strategy,” he said, hinting at a future where securing a business isn’t about stitching together tools, but adopting an operating model designed for the messy, fast-moving, AI-powered world we actually live in.
In collaboration with Cato Networks