Versa Networks announced it has
secured additional financing of $120M. The pre-IPO round was led by funds and
accounts managed by BlackRock, Inc. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) also participated
in the funding.
This new round of funding will
enable Versa to expand go-to-market strategies and accelerate on
its industry-leading SASE innovations to further cement its leadership position
in the SASE market, while setting Versa on its planned IPO path.
"As the
leader in SASE, the fastest growing security and networking category, and
executing on SASE services for years, Versa is the only solution proven to
deliver the industry's leading and differentiated architecture for high
performance and security," said Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa Networks. "This
funding will allow us to expand our go-to-market and accelerate new innovations
that will further expand the market opportunity for us as a company."
"We are excited to support the
Versa team and its vision to drive innovation across cloud, data and network
security," said Matt Singer, Managing Director, BlackRock. "SASE represents an
important and fast-growing market that is at the core of organizations' digital
transformation and Versa, with its unified, single-code based architecture, is
well positioned to deliver mission critical value to its customers."
According to Gartner, the SASE market is expected to grow to $15 billion in 2025, and 80
percent of enterprises will have a strategy to unify web, cloud services and
private application access using a SASE architecture. Dell'Oro Group lists Versa
as a SASE market share leader, while Gartner has identified Versa
SASE as having the most SASE components out of
all 56 vendors Gartner evaluated.
"Versa is an industry leader in
driving SASE innovation and adoption," said Cody Nenadal, Managing Director at
Silicon Valley Bank. "We are excited to work with Versa and support their
continued growth as they provide more organizations with the value of a fully
integrated single-vendor SASE solution."
Apurva Mehta, Co-Founder &
Chief Technology Officer of Versa Networks, said, "We are the only
company that offers a fully integrated single-vendor SASE
solution. We saw this opportunity in the market coming more than
five years ago, and since then have been providing enterprises around the
world with a truly modern secure network. It is exciting that the
rest of the industry now recognizes the real value and benefits that
single-vendor SASE can provide."
Kumar
Mehta, Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer of Versa Networks, said,
"Enterprises are waking up to the power of more efficient and integrated
security and networking infrastructure for the expanding attack surface.
Support from marquee name investors like BlackRock is a testament to not only
our leading innovative technology, but to our ethos as a platform company. We
look forward to working with BlackRock and all our investors as Versa enters
this important pre-IPO phase of the business."
Versa's single-vendor SASE platform
delivers best-of-breed functions that tightly integrate and deliver services
via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both via VOSTM with a
Single-Pass Parallel Processing architecture and managed through a single pane
of glass. Versa delivers SASE services such as Secure SD-WAN, Next-Generation
Firewall, Next-Generation Firewall as a Service, Unified Threat Management
(UTM) including Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Secure Web Gateway (SWG),
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Data
Loss Prevention (DLP), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), and User and Entity
Behavior Analytics (UEBA). Versa's single-vendor SASE platform goes above and
beyond management console automation integration by providing the ability to
integrate networks, points of presence, policy definitions, application
definitions, agent logic, and data lakes.