Venture capital (VC) investors have bet big on zero trust, pouring nearly $3 billion in funding to equip legacy security models with zero trust from 2018 to 2021, GlobalData found. Jumpcloud, Netskope, and Illumio were among the startups that banked more than $100 million in VC funding. 

“VC deals in the zero trust space have resulted in billion-dollar-plus valuations for many nascent startups,” Prasad Kakade, senior disruptive tech analyst at GlobalData, said in a statement. "The funding is predominantly inclined toward zero-trust solutions such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity access management (IAM), and microsegmentation.”

Cybersecurity unicorn Illumio closed a Thomas Bravo-led $225 million Series F funding round last June that pushed its valuation to $2.75 billion. The firm has raised $557.5 million, and was recently named a "leader" in Forrester’s “New Wave for Microsegmentation” report,

Illumio offers zero-trust segmentation services to protect against ransomware and isolated cyberattacks from spreading across cloud-native apps, hybrid and multi-cloud, data centers, and endpoints, GlobalData noted.

In the same summer, Netskope announced a $300 million funding round led by existing investor Iconiq Growth that sent its valuation skyrocketing to $7.5 billion, which more than doubled Netskope’s valuation.

Identifying itself as a secure access services edge (SASE) leader, Netskope got its start as one of the original cloud access security brokers (CASBs). Its SASE platform includes CASB, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway, and its NewEdge private cloud. Those capabilities, plus MFA and single sign-on (SSO), allows Netskope to secures users, applications, data, and resources, GlobalData pointed out.

Colorado-based startup Jumpcloud secured a $159 million Series F funding round led by Sapphire Ventures in September 2021. This followed a $100 million Series E round that more than tripled the company’s valuation to $2.56 billion.

The vendor enables enterprises to gain secure access to cloud environments using IAM and SSO, according to GlobalData. Jumpcloud claims it offers a single, comprehensive directory platform that unifies user and device management, and nearly 5,000 customers from more than 100 countries chose its directory platform, in the funding announcement.

Other zero-trust startups that secured more than $100 million in VC funding between 2018 and 2021 include Sysdig, Menlo Security, and Keyfactor.

“Cybersecurity spending will escalate and acquire a larger share of IT budgets as enterprises globally focus on eliminating cyberthreats,” Kakade concluded. “New developments in zero-trust microsegmentation principles are anticipated to attract VC interest that verify devices based on their IP address and public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate, among other factors.”