Riding high on his company’s new $340 million investment, which puts Netskope at a nearly $3 billion valuation, CEO Sanjay Beri says the rest of the industry is finally coming around to his vision of cloud-delivered security. Eight years later, this vision that Beri drew on a napkin in 2012 has a name, and its name is SASE.

Gartner coined the term, which stands for secure access service edge, late last year. Since then SD-WAN and security vendors have been quick to jump on the SASE train. “The reality is: they are not,” Beri said. “I call this ‘SASE washing.’”

Gartner has specific SASE requirements, Beri continued. It’s a new type of network security architecture that consolidates networking and security capabilities into an edge cloud-delivered service.

“When Gartner says the future of data and network security is SASE, or secure access service edge, what they mean is a cloud edge — so it’s not built in the public cloud,” Beri said, pointing to Netskope’s NewEdge infrastructure it rolled out last year. “And two, it will have all these services, it will cover SaaS and public cloud like a CASB, web like a web gateway, it will cover your private data center applications, so it replaces your VPN.”

Not coincidentally for Netskope, it has all three components on its cloud security platform. Over the summer it announced NewEdge, a globally distributed network architecture to support its cloud-native security platform. At this point it has 50 points of presence, and each has a minimum 2 Tb/s of capacity. “So we’ve over 100 Tb/s total capacity,” Beri said.

The platform also includes a cloud-native Secure Web Gateway, which unifies Netskope’s original cloud access security broker (CASB) technology, web gateway, and data loss prevention technology.

And finally, the third piece: Netskope for Private Access. This is the newest addition. It’s a cloud-based service for secure access to private enterprise applications in both the public cloud and the data center, and it will be generally available next week. Right now it has about 40 beta customers.

“The first napkin I drew in 2012, what we were building, that’s what they are now saying is SASE,” Beri said. “Palo Alto, a lot of others made fatal flaws, attempting to do this in the public cloud, or trying to forklift their boxes into the cloud. But they don’t understand the language of the cloud, which is APIs, they still speak the old language. They are trying to latch onto the term, but they are not what is meant by SASE.”

Netskope invested a significant amount of research and development into its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies and team last year, Beri said. “We’ve always been huge investors in R&D, we’re also investing a lot in our partners and our sales team,” Beri said. “Fifteen to 20 of our best reps came from Symantec, and a bunch of Zsacaler folk. In the field, people are definitely flocking to our company.”

The company also plans to continue “doubling down” on its presence in the United States and abroad, he added.

This investment seems to be paying off. Netskope saw 80% growth in enterprise customers from 2018 to 2019, Beri said. And now it has an additional $340 million investment, which brings its total to $740.1 million raised.

After the company raised $168.7 in a 2018 Series F funding round, Beri remained adamant that his company was not interested in a sale — “We are fiercely independent,” he said at the time — and that’s still the case. While it may consider an initial public offering (IPO) down the road, “we are not going that other route,” he said. “Every investor knows that, our employees know that, our customers and partners know that, that is now why we built the company.”

He’s not saying never to an IPO, but “our goal is to dominate the biggest market in security,” Beri said. “And if it’s easier for me to do that privately, if I can grow faster and I can put the investment in R&D that I believe needs to be put in R&D, then I will do that privately.”

With the massive, late-stage funding rounds, “we have no capital reason to do it,” he added. “You’ve seen what happens with the traditional companies going public. Their investment in R&D is like 17%, 18%, and that’s not the model we pursue. Look what happened with Symantec, McAfee, what used to be two big security companies and we’re replacing them every week.”

Symantec, which went public in 1989, eventually sold its enterprise security business to Broadcom for $10.7 billion over the summer. The deal came after Symantec spent the last few years struggling to shift its business — or at least its reputation — to an enterprise cloud security specialist.

McAfee, which spun out of Intel in 2016, has seen similar struggles, and is reportedly mulling a sale or an IPO. Last month it hired Peter Leav to replace its CEO Chris Young who has led the company since it became a standalone security firm. Some see this as a clear indication that McAfee wants to sell rather than go public.

Beri sees these as cautionary tales. “There hasn’t been any innovation there,” he said. "In security, you innovate or you die.”