Will Netskope, Led by Sanjay Beri, Win Intense Cybersecurity Competition
Cybersecurity firm Netskope, founded by Sanjay Beri, goes public at a valuation of $10 billion
(Photo: Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO Netskope.)
September 24, 2025
This year, there has been a sharp rise in private companies going public in the United States. Among other things, they are hoping to raise funds at higher valuations as stock markets hit new highs, powered by major technology stocks. As of mid-September, there were 241 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the US, compared to 176 in all of 2024.
Last week, among the companies going public was Netskope, a Santa Clara, California, based vendor of data and network security software. “The world is moving to AI and cloud,” founder and Chief Executive Sanjay Beri told CNBC. “That requires a redefinition of the biggest market in security, data network security. That’s what we are.”
Netskope has more than 4,000 clients worldwide, including a third of the Fortune 100 companies. Its current annual revenue run rate is $707 million, growing by a third year over year. Most of the revenues come from customers who pay more than $100,000 a year. On an accounting basis the company lost $170 million in the first half of fiscal year 2026. Its operating cash flow was $9 million during the same period. It has more than 3,000 employees around the globe.
Netskope went public at a valuation of $9.6 billion. On the first day of trading last week, Netskope’s stock rose by nearly a fifth. The twenty largest IPOs of 2025 have risen by more than a third on their first day of trading, according to Reuters. The relatively tepid response to Netskope’s public offering likely reflects that it operates in an intensely competitive field. It faces 298 rivals, according to Tracxn.
Competitors include technology giants Google, Broadcom, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Crowdstrike, and Zscaler, as well as 48 startups with venture funding. The large companies are buying rivals. In March, for instance, Google announced it would pay $32 billion to buy Wiz, a New York based cloud security platform. Google parent Alphabet has a market value of nearly $3 trillion. In July, Palo Alto Networks announced it would buy CyberArk, a Newton, Massachusetts, based identity security firm for $25 billion. Palo Alto has a market value of $134 billion,
“Fewer cybersecurity startups are going public,” notes Morningstar, a stock research firm. This is because of the growing difficulty they face in meeting the needs of large customers, which are already comfortable with established vendors like Palo Alto Networks, Mariano Payano, partner at venture firm Iconiq told Morningstar. Iconiq was an early investor in Netskope and its stock ownership in the company was worth $1.4 billion following the IPO.
Netskope secured a total of $1.4 billion in venture funding from Iconiq, Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Sequoia, and other venture firms. In 2013, when Lightspeed led an early funding round in Netskope, the “cloud transition was still in the early stages,” notes Arif Janmohamed, a partner at Lightspeed, in a blog post on the Netskope IPO. Janmohamed added, “Hard to believe…the AI revolution was still almost a decade away…Sanjay (Beri) had an unwavering conviction that the cloud would change the way that we work, live, and play…Central to this vision was a bet that not only did he need to build a global secure network, but that he would also have to invest deeply in emerging machine learning and AI technologies.” Following the IPO, “Netskope is just getting started for the long run…and we are excited for what lies ahead.” Lightspeed owns Netskope shares worth $1.2 billion at the offering price.
Prior to founding Netskope, Beri was at Juniper Networks as vice president Access and Security, from 2007 to 2012. He grew the business from scratch to $200 million in annual revenues. He built and led a 300-member team. He joined Juniper as a Product Manager in 2004. Earlier, Beri was a Senior Product Manager, Security, at McAfee, during 2003 and 2004.
From 1999 to 2003, he was a co-founder and Head of Product Management at Ingrian Networks, a data security company, which was acquired by SafeNet. In 1999, he was a systems engineer at E-Stamp Corp. The previous year he worked as a designer and research assistant at the VLSI Research Labs at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He started his career as a software design engineer at Microsoft in 1995; he was then a design engineer at Newbridge Networks.
Beri, who grew up in Toronto, Canada, migrated to the US. He earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University; and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, near Toronto. While at the Stanford campus in California’s Silicon Valley, he discovered the value of making connections with entrepreneurs, company leaders, investors and mentors, he told Forbes.
In fiscal year 2025, Beri’s salary was nearly $1 million. He, and a trust he controls, own Netskope stock worth roughly $570 million.
In a blog post, he writes that “my whole life had prepared me for this path” to founding and running Netskope. From “my early days helping my mom sell lipsticks door to door as a kid, and watching my dad, a nuclear reactor quality engineer by trade and the kindest soul I’ve ever known, live with unwavering integrity in everything he did.” Beri’s mom was a salesperson for “everything from Amway to Avon,” and her “values were ‘we’ve got to go earn it and go get it,'” he told Gartner.com.
In 2012, when he founded Netskope, Beri writes in a blog post, he “knew then that something entirely new needed to be created…to lead the way in a rapidly evolving digital world” to deliver “a consistent, high-quality secure digital experience at scale.” He told Gartner.com that “criminals and attackers don’t wait. Frankly, they prey on old legacy systems and companies…we want to create something that can defend enterprises and help them stay ahead of attackers and have an impact.”