Cato Networks raised $359 million in its latest funding round, taking its valuation to more than $4.8 billion.

The Tel Aviv-based secure access service edge (SASE) firm raised the new capital in a Series G round led by Vitruvian Partners and ION Crossover Partners. The latest investments bolstered Cato's total funding to more than $1 billion.

Existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Acrew Capital, and Adams Street Partners joined the round, with Cato looking to expand its platform’s capabilities to cover additional use cases, including IoT security, SD-WAN, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA).

It's also looking to invest in research and development to support new AI-powered use cases as well as grow its partner ecosystem and customer-facing teams to “meet surging global demand.”

“We're embedding AI into the DNA of infrastructure itself," Cato CEO Shlomo Kramer noted in a statement. "Routine tasks are automated. Response workflows are accelerated. Risk management decisions are guided by actionable live data, not outdated reports. This isn't about tools, it's about a new operating model that is efficient, resilient, and optimized.”

The company was founded in 2015 by Kramer, who also previously founded cybersecurity firm Checkpoint, and Gur Shatz, the co-founder of networking company Incapsula.

Cato’s cloud-based network platform secures enterprise communications, and went on to achieve unicorn status following an October 2021 funding raise.

The firm earlier this year integrated Amazon’s Bedrock platform, which lets users develop custom foundation models, into its SASE Cloud platform. The integration allows users to build generative AI (genAI)-powered security-optimized measures for IT and security teams.

Cato’s newest backers include Vitruvian Partners, a private equity firm that counts Snow Software and Voxbone among its prior investments, and ION Crossover Partners, an Israel-based investment management company that previously backed cybersecurity firms Cycode and Guardio.

“Cato has spent the past decade building and optimizing the next generation of cybersecurity, and we are proud to partner with them as they continue to raise the bar for AI-driven security and networking,” Vitruvian Partners said in a statement.

Cato’s counts beer giant Carlsberg, aviation services company Swissport, and engineering firm CESI among its customers.