Secure access service edge vendor (SASE) Cato Networks today announced it had secured $77 million in its latest and largest funding round to date. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures, Greylock Partners, Singtel Innov8, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), and the company’s founder and CEO Shlomo Kramer, who has contributed to the past two rounds.

"This round of financing is a testament to the unique value Cato delivers to customers even under the most difficult business conditions," Kramer said in a statement.

Cato has raised more than 200 million in venture capital funding since it was founded in 2015. The funding round comes after the company reported a 220% increase in bookings for 2019.

Gartner touted SASE in its annual Hype Cycle report last year. SASE stitches together elements of edge computing, security, and wide-area networking (WAN) into a single cloud-managed package.

Cato Networks was among the first the vendors to take up the SASE sigil, which the company says described its overarching approach to security and networking from the very beginning. Further, the company claims to be the “first true implementation” of a SASE product.

“The convergence of these two categories is a paradigm shift that completely transforms the IT cost-benefit model,” said Yoni Cheifetz, a partner at Lightspeed, in a statement.

Cato has staked its claim as the first SASE vendor on the scene, but it's not alone. Some analysts have called SASE a Gartner marketing term, but at least a dozen security and SD-WAN vendors have adopted the architecture since it was unveiled in August last year.

Palo Alto Networks last week announced it had acquired SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in a bid to fill out its own SASE platform. Earlier this year, security vendors Perimeter 81 and McAfee each announced their intent to launch a SASE product. And late last month, Akamai rolled out secure web gateways to its security platform in preparation to adopt a SASE architecture.