Security unicorn SentinelOne and almost unicorn Menlo Security raised hundreds of millions of dollars in late-stage funding this week.

SentinelOne, an endpoint security turned extended detection and response (XDR) vendor, closed a $267 million Series F round, putting its valuation above $3 billion. Meanwhile, Menlo Security, a web security vendor and rising secure access service edge (SASE) star, scored a $100 million Series E round, bringing its valuation to $800 million.

The massive late-stage investments, coupled with both startups’ year-over-year revenue growth, reflect the growing importance of SASE and XDR as enterprises struggle to secure a newly remote workforce using technology without on-site IT services and support. And it also indicates that these types of cloud-delivered protection and remediation services will continue growing in value through 2021.

SentinelOne's funding round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Sequoia Capital Global Equities and existing investors including Insight Partners and Third Point Ventures. To date, SentinelOne has raised $696.5 million in seven funding rounds, and the Series F follows an earlier $200 million round in February. Also since the February Series E, SentinelOne’s valuation has tripled.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, SentinelOne was founded in 2013. While it started as an endpoint security vendor, earlier this year it launched an XDR platform called Singularity that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor, hunt for threats, and remediate threats across all network-connected devices and cloud workloads. Specifically, it unifies endpoint protection (EPP), endpoint detection and response (EDR), IoT control, and container and cloud-native workload protection (CWPP) in a central platform.

SentinelOne has more than 4,000 customers, and it adds “many hundreds of new customers every quarter,” SentinelOne COO Nick Warner said. This includes four of the Fortune 10, and hundreds of Global 2000 enterprises, he added.

The company also boasts 130% year-over-year revenue growth among its Fortune 500 accounts, and a 125% enterprise net retention rate. It claims a 74% overall deal win rate for the last 12 months, and a 72% deal win rate against fellow endpoint protection vendor and competitor CrowdStrike over the same time period.

The latest funding round “is validation from a financial and business perspective on the path that we’re on, which is building a durable business that will be ready for the IPO markets in 12 to 18 months, and establishing us as a permanent player in the cybersecurity space that we’re in,” Warner said.

The company plans to use the latest investment to further invest in engineering and XDR platform development, as well as its sales team and global expansion efforts, Warner added.

Menlo Security, based in Palo Alto, California, and founded in 2013, also boasts explosive growth and record customers wins during 2020. It claims 155% annual recurring revenue growth and a more than 100% in average deal size year to date compared to the same period last year.

Menlo Security says its customers include seven of the 10 largest banks, four of the five largest credit-card issuers, and some of the largest energy and critical infrastructure companies in the world. In September, it inked a nearly $200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, which will use Menlo’s isolation technology to protect its networks worldwide.

And that same month it scored a SASE partnership with VMware under which the virtualization giant will natively integrate Menlo’s Security Cloud SWG platform — this includes secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss protection (DLP), email security, and web isolation — into its SASE service. “So when customers go to buy a SASE solution from VMware, it’s gonna be Menlo powered as it relates to secure web gateway,” Menlo Security CTO and co-founder Kowsik Guruswamy said.

Menlo’s Series E investment brings its total raised to $260.5 million in six funding rounds. Vista Equity Partners led the latest round with additional participation from Neuberger Berman funds, General Catalyst, JP Morgan, and other existing investors.

“It marks a key inflection point in Menlo’s life alongside the good news momentum that we saw in 2020,” Guruswamy said about the Series E, adding that the company will use it to further invest in its research and development as well as its sales and go-to-market strategy.

However, Guruswamy pushes back against the suggestion that Menlo will go the Carbon Black route with VMware — playing an integral role in VMware’s security strategy as a partner for a year before being acquired by the larger company.

“We’re announcing $100-million-dollar round, and that sends a clear signal,” he said. “From the beginning, our objective has really been to disrupt the market and be an independent company. We’re seeing a phenomenal opportunity by providing a consolidated security platform to customers, and it touches upon a lot of different things.”

Guruswamy cites growing customer demand for things like zero-trust security and safe access to the internet, cloud services, and private applications now that most employees work remotely because of the pandemic.

“Secure web gateway is morphing very rapidly, to take into account firewall as a service and CASB, DLP, and all of that stuff,” Guruswamy said. “Given all of that momentum, we continue to believe that there’s an incredible opportunity ahead of us to become an independent company.”