SentinelOne Raises $120M Series D For Automated Enterprise Security

With enterprises paying closer attention to how they’re protecting data and applications as frequent security breaches flood the news, companies aiming to help them out have continuously scored funding.

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Today, SentinelOne, a SaaS company taking on enterprise endpoint security, announced that it has scored a $120 million Series D led by Insight Venture Partners. Previous investors, including Tiger Global Management, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Redpoint Ventures, and others also participated in the round.

SentinelOne, founded in 2013, has raised a known total of about $230 million. The company last raised a $70 million Series C in January 2017. SentinelOne CEO and co-founder Tomer Weingarten told Crunchbase News in an interview that the company has been on a massive growth trajectory.

So what does SentinelOne bring to the table that other cybersecurity companies, particularly legacy companies, don’t?

“Having a highly advanced system that’s based in machine learning, that can not only detect anomalies, but also mitigate them in real time, independently, and autonomously–this is just stuff you really don’t get with almost any security solution out there,” Weingarten expressed.

Weingarten said that automation, particularly where it concerns the company’s ActiveEDR (endpoint detection and response) product, means that security teams can potentially refocus their efforts.

“It allows [companies] to really, in some cases, automate away the tier one analyst role and really focus on high-level investigation,” Weingarten said.

SentinelOne’s platform includes cloud and data center protection, and the company has also introduced products for endpoint security for IoT devices, which are being used more frequently.

“[There’s] a lot of emphasis on better securing the classic endpoint devices like laptops and desktop, and that’s obviously needed, but there’s this barrage of devices laying around dormant on the same corporate networks. And they’re, in a sense, another attack surface that no one’s really paying attention to,” Weingarten said.

He declined to release specific dollar metrics about ARR, but said the company grew more than 200 percent year over year, and that it’s working with three of the Fortune 10.

SentinelOne doesn’t just offer it’s software to enterprise security teams, it also partners with other security providers, called MSSPs, or managed security service providers, allowing them to build on top of the SentinelOne platform for their own services.

“When you partner with someone like SolarWinds, you’re serving [the market], but it’s SolarWinds that’s actually selling and carrying the solution,” Weingarten explained. “It’s just a very effective go-to-market that really enables us to scale pretty quickly.”

As for the funding, the company will continue to invest in sales and marketing, while doubling down on its product innovation.

“Given that we’ve been able to win about 70% of opportunities–and that’s against every vendor out there, legacy and next-gen alike–when you build on top of the matrix you obviously want to double down,” said Weingarten.

And while he believes that SentinelOne is doing a first-rate job at helping enterprises mitigate risks, he says there’s a lot of room to grow for all cyber companies, particularly where it concerns patching.

“Attackers are taking advantage of vulnerabilities in applications that are not getting patched on time,” he expressed.

While that’s not great, it does mean that the market potential in cybersecurity is huge and growing as the risks become more severe and the attackers, more intelligent. And where potential exists, funding follows.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias