Congratulations to the entire team at SentinelOne. Today, they listed on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “S.” We at Insight join SentinelOne in celebrating this exceptional milestone. Insight led their $120M Series D in June 2019. Shortly thereafter we led their $200M Series E in February 2020 and participated super pro rata in their $267M Series F in November 2020. With the success of the IPO, we are looking forward to the journey ahead with SentinelOne.
SentinelOne was founded in 2013, and Insight’s first contact with the company was less than a year later. It took us roughly 5 years before we made our first investment. There were several market dynamics that SentinelOne had to overcome.
- SentinelOne was the young underdog, and without deep pockets and blue-chip customer references it was hard to compete in the enterprise segment of the market. Fortune 2000 companies often insisted on choosing market leaders with established track records and substantial financial backing to ensure that they could endure downturns and maintain an aggressive R&D budget.
- They were up against a market with high vendor lock-in. Customers commit to longer term deals when they choose their endpoint vendor vs. other software products, and these are also difficult solutions to rip and replace after a company-wide deployment.
Insight bet on the company due to several changes in the market:
- The endpoint security market was accelerating and could support multiple winners. We estimated that this was a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity but in retrospect, it was bigger and would grow even faster than we anticipated.
- The endpoint market was amid a replacement cycle where challenger vendors were displacing legacy vendors. Market share held by legacy endpoint vendors was slowly declining, surfacing billions of spend for S1 to go after.
- SentinelOne had a market-leading product and with a strong customer base. S1 went a layer deeper than its competition by providing remediation in addition to autonomous protection. This meant that they could not only detect and mitigate an attack, but they could also contain it. A full-featured security platform that could provide market-leading autonomous protection and remediation would quickly gain market share from traditional anti-virus offerings.
- SentinelOne established a competitive advantage in its channel partners and could continue to leverage those relationships to scale its GTM and brand. SentinelOne sells through a rich ecosystem of partners that includes independent software vendors (ISVs) and channel partners, such as MSPs and MSSPs.
Under Tomer’s leadership, SentinelOne has grown to become the only XDR (Extended Detection Response) platform in the market. Since our investment, they’ve launched strategic products in Ranger IoT and acquired Scalyr. They extended security beyond the endpoint to cloud workloads, IoT devices, and unmanaged devices. They added the ability to contextualize and correlate structured and unstructured data using an enterprise-grade log management and data observability platform (formerly Scalyr), giving security teams the ability to search through massive databases to investigate incidents and proactively hunt threats.
As a result, SentinelOne is recognized as a leader in the endpoint security market as defined by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Most recently, the XDR platform stopped SUNBURST, the malware that tricked systems into uploading it as an update to the SolarWinds’ software, which is used by thousands of organizations.
SentinelOne overcame the odds to become a market leader in the endpoint space. Congratulations again to the entire SentinelOne team on achieving such an exciting ScaleUp milestone. As Tomer Weingarten, CEO and founder stated, “The world is a safer place because of SentinelOne.”
ScaleUp Milestone Series – WalkMe’s IPO
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