The SASE native that bet its entire architecture on converging networking and security — and is now embedding NVIDIA GPUs into its global backbone to enforce that bet in the AI era.
www.catonetworks.com ↗Cato Networks was founded in 2015 by Shlomo Kramer (co-founder of Check Point Software and Imperva) and Gur Shatz (co-founder of Incapsula) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company built the Cato SASE Cloud Platform from scratch as a cloud-native convergence of SD-WAN, SSE, ZTNA, FWaaS, and XDR — replacing the fragmented stack of firewalls, routers, and proxies that enterprises had accumulated. It serves 4,000+ enterprise customers globally and surpassed $350 million in ARR in 2025, growing 43% year-over-year.
June 2025 brought a $359 million Series G round led by Vitruvian Partners and ION Crossover Partners, valuing the company at $4.8 billion and bringing total funding above $1 billion. In September 2025, Cato made its first-ever acquisition — purchasing Israeli AI security startup Aim Security for approximately $350 million, funded in part by an extended $50 million addition to the Series G. Aim Security, backed by YL Ventures and Canaan Partners, was known for discovering the first zero-click AI vulnerability in Microsoft 365 Copilot ('EchoLeak,' CVE-2025-32711). Cato's long-anticipated IPO, previously expected in 2025, has been delayed; Kramer has stated they can go public 'in a few months' when ready.
Cato's technical approach is the most architecturally unified in the SASE market: a single-pass processing engine handles networking and security functions simultaneously in each of its 85+ global PoPs, eliminating the latency penalties of chained inspection appliances. In March 2026, Cato unveiled Cato Neural Edge — deploying NVIDIA GPUs across its entire PoP backbone for real-time AI-driven traffic inspection — and Cato AI Security, which integrates Aim Security's AI governance and runtime protection directly into the platform. This makes Cato the first SASE provider to embed GPU compute natively into its network fabric.
Cato's acquisition of Aim Security is the most strategically decisive move in the AI security space in 2025 — not because of Aim's product, but because of what it signals about SASE consolidation. Cato is betting that enterprises will demand AI security from their SASE vendor rather than deploying a separate point solution, and the Aim integration (now branded Cato AI Security) allows it to make that pitch with credibility. The GPU-powered Cato Neural Edge announcement in March 2026 reinforces this: by embedding inference compute into its PoP backbone, Cato can run AI models inline without the architectural compromise of offloading to public cloud. Founder Shlomo Kramer's prior exits (Check Point, Imperva) give him unusual credibility in both the enterprise and investor communities. At $350M ARR growing 43% with $1B+ in total funding and a delayed but imminent IPO, Cato is the private company most capable of disrupting the established SASE players.
Cato competes most directly with Netskope and Zscaler in SASE/SSE, and with Palo Alto Networks (Prisma SASE) in the SD-WAN + security convergence space. Its single-platform architecture is a genuine differentiator: competitors like Netskope have stronger data security depth, but Cato's PoP-level convergence eliminates the multi-vendor integration complexity that burdens enterprise security teams. The Aim Security acquisition closes the AI governance gap relative to Netskope's native DLP capabilities and gives Cato a research team with demonstrated vulnerability discovery credentials. The primary risk is valuation: the $4.8B private valuation and IPO delay create uncertainty about whether public market multiples will validate the company's trajectory. Against Cloudflare, Cato competes for the 'single platform' buyer but lacks Cloudflare's consumer-facing network scale and developer ecosystem.
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