Secure access service edge (SASE) startup Cato Networks dove deep into double-unicorn territory this week after securing $200 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Greylock, Aspect Ventures, Acrew Capital, Coatue, Singtel Innov8, and Cato CEO Shlomo Kramer also participated in the round.

The Israel-based network and security company has raised more than $532 million since it was founded in early 2015, with its latest funding round pushing its valuation north of $2.5 billion.

Cato plans to invest its latest cash infusion to expand its sales team and address the needs of larger enterprise customers. “Cato is rapidly expanding its service capabilities, global footprint, and sales marketing teams,” Kramer said in a statement.

Cato was an early champion of Gartner’s SASE product category, which stitches together elements of SD-WAN, managed security, and edge compute into a single cloud-managed package.

The company claims it was already moving in this direction prior to Gartner publishing its 2019 Hype Cycle report on SASE. Today, the company’s networking and security stack is distributed across more than 65 global points of presence, and earlier this year announced its first service provider partnership with Japan’s KDDI.

“We are still the first and only pure SASE platform that was built from the ground up,” Kramer boasted in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

To date, Cato has secured more than 650 customers across 7,000 locations around the globe. Of these, the company claims “dozens” of enterprise customers with annual spends in excess of $250,000, and “several global enterprises” with annual spends over $1 million.

“Cato has seen an amazing adoption of its SASE platform by increasingly larger enterprises,” said Yoni Cheifetz, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement.

Over the past two years, the SASE space has ballooned from relative obscurity to one of the industry's hottest products. To date, nearly every major networking and security vendor has built, bought, or partnered their way into the market.

Palo Alto Networks, VMware, Fortinet, Cisco, and Versa are just a handful of the vendors that now claim a SASE platform. And this trend is expected to accelerate over the next few years.

In its latest WAN Edge Magic Quadrant report, Gartner predicted a substantial shift among SD-WAN customers toward SASE architectures.

“By 2024, more than 70% of [SD-WAN] customers will have implemented a [SASE] architecture, compared to 40% in 2021,” analysts predict. And by 2025, Gartner anticipates 40% of enterprises will have cut the MPLS cord and shifted to an internet-only WAN infrastructure.

According to Kramer, Cato is better prepared than most to capitalize on these market dynamics as unlike its competitors it isn’t “using building blocks duct-taped together with cloud-native point solutions.”

“Our position is that building [Amazon Web Services]-like networking and security cloud service requires a brand-new platform and architecture,” he said.