Israel-based enterprise network developer Cato Networks received $55m yesterday in a funding round backed by Singtel Innov8, the corporate venturing arm of telecommunications firm Singapore Telecommunications.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which featured commitments from fellow venture capital firms Aspect Ventures, Greylock, US Venture Partners (USVP) and company co-founders Shlomo Kramer and Gur Shatz.
Founded in 2015, Cato operates a cloud-based networking and security platform dubbed Cato Cloud, which safely connects enterprise users and data spread across multiple locations. Cato Cloud depends on a global network of carrier nodes that monitor data latency and packet loss to establish the best route for a given connection.
The company has added more than 300 enterprises to its customer base so far and recently opened a new network operations centre to help improve its last-mile data transfer capacity.
Singtel Innov8 had previously invested in Cato’s $30m series B round in 2016, which was led by Greylock and backed by USVP, Aspect Ventures, Kramer and Shatz. It came after Aspect and USVP had co-led a $20m series A for Cato the previous year.
Shlomo Kramer, now chief executive of Cato Networks, said: “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.”