Cato Networks announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew from $1 million to $100 million in five years, designating the secure access service edge (SASE) vendor a “centaur” shortly after it achieved unicorn status in 2020.

VP of Product Marketing Eyal Webber-Zvik called the designation an “empiric metric of startup success,” rather than what he said is typically a more “fluid” ranking based on valuations.

“Ranking everybody above $1 billion valuation – and especially before the recession, there were too many of those – it was very hard to clear through the noise,” he told SDxCentral. “Centaur means a company has proven that [it] can sell at least $100 million in annual revenue.”

Cato claims the time it took to reach $100M ARR is a record for Enterprise networking security. Its competing vendor Aryaka Networks has also reported more than $100 million in ARR.

As Cato was able to grow despite a strained macroeconomic environment, Webber-Zvik said that “for many cyber companies, recession is actually a good time for growth.”

“These are times where enterprises are looking to become more efficient in managing the network and security from one side.” he noted. “And on the other side, not willing to make any compromises in those areas.”

Webber-Zvik said Cato’s rapid growth is “100% attributed to the adoption and acceptance of the concept of SASE,” Gartner’s term for the convergence of networking and security as a cloud-delivered service.

Gartner says a complete SASE offering combines network edge capabilities like SD-WAN and a set of cloud-centric security capabilities dubbed the security services edge (SSE) – a cloud-delivered security suite that includes zero-trust network access (ZTNA), cloud-access security broker (Cloud Access Security Broker), secure web gateway (SWG), and firewall-as-a-service (FaaS).

Recently the analyst firm identified Cato along with Cisco, Citrix, Fortinet, Forcepoint, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, and VMware as representative vendors in the single-vendor SASE market.

Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner previously explained to SDxCentral that a well-architected single-vendor (or unified) SASE solution specifically includes a unified management plane covering the breadth of all these functionalities with a “single policy engine, single place to define or import apps and users, and single Application Programming Interface that exposes most capabilities and a common data lake.”

Webber-Zvik said “in the early years,” many enterprises objected or were skeptical about moving networks and network security to cloud services. But Cato's $100 million in sales “really means that this is a widely accepted concept by now,” he added.

“At this point, it's just a matter of making us continue to grow as fast as we are in order to become the leaders in this.”

According to Webber-Zvik, single-vendor SASE architecture is what will continue to establish leaders in the market.

He attributes the fact that Cato’s single-pass SASE architecture didn’t come from “integration or acquisitions, or a combination of both,” as key to setting the vendor apart from its competitors.

Although, Webber-Zvik was able to identify Palo Alto Networks, which he said “holds a very respectful place in the competition,” and Netskope as Cato’s biggest competitors. “Netskope has a very good cloud security solution and they acquired a company to help them build their SD-WAN offering. I'm appreciative of their engineering achievements so far, I think they'll be a viable competitor in the future as well,” he said.

And Webber-Zvik doesn't see anything wrong with a little competition in the SASE space.

“I don't want to be alone in the business. We have to have competitions. It drives all of us to be better at what we do. And it challenges us to build a better product and solution,” he said.