Cato Networks Raises $55M to Take On Legacy Telcos

SD-WAN provider Cato Networks secured $55 million in a new round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Its current investors — Aspect Ventures, Greylock Partners, Singtel Innov8, USVP, and Cato co-founders Shlomo Kramer and Gur Shatz — also contributed. This brings Cato’s total funding to $125 million. CEO and co-founder Kramer told SDxCentral that the funding will further the startup’s service infrastructure as well as boost its engineering and support organizations, and its sales and marketing efforts.Kramer and Shatz founded the Israel-based Cato in 2015 to build a converged cloud-based architecture that acts as a replacement to traditional connectivity options like MPLS. Cato has been positioning itself as “the uncarrier” of the SD-WAN world.Following the new round, Kramer told SDxCentral that “Cato is building a new type of carrier, one that evolves at cloud speed and provides a managed network experience addressing global, SD-WAN, security, cloud, and mobility needs,” he said. “It is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that is aligned with the general trend to move away from do-it-yourself products to cloud services as a way to optimize spend and accelerate business growth.”Since its founding, Cato has seen significant growth. The company claims that during 2018, its customer base exceeded 300 enterprises, its bookings grew by 352 percent year over year, and it added several enterprise customers with more than 30,000 employees to its base. And it was recently ranked as a visionary — alongside CloudGenix and Versa Networks — in Gartner’s inaugural Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.