SingTel Innov8
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Cato Network snags $130M Series E on $1B valuation as cloud wide area networking thrives
Cato Networks has spent the last five years building a cloud-based wide area network that lets individuals connect to network resources regardless of where they are. When the pandemic hit, and many businesses shifted to work from home, it was the perfect moment for technology like this. Today, the company was rewarded with a $130 million Series E investment on $1 billion valuation.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation from new investor Coatue and existing investors Greylock, Aspect Ventures/Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8 and Shlomo Kramer (who is the co-founder and CEO of the company). The company reports it has now raised $332 million since inception.
Kramer is a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Check Point Software, which went public in 1996, and Imperva, which went public in 2011 and was later acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2018. He helped launch Cato in 2015. “In 2015, we identified that the wide area networks (WANs), which is a tens of billions of dollars market, was still built on the same technology stack […] that connects physical locations, and appliances that protect physical locations and was primarily sold by the telcos and MSPs for many years,” Kramer explained.
The idea with Cato was to take that technology and redesign it for a mobile and cloud world, not one that was built for the previous generation of software that lived in private data centers and was mostly accessed from an office. Today they have a cloud-based network of 60 Points of Presence (PoPs) around the world, giving customers access to networking resources and network security no matter where they happen to be.
The bet they made was a good one because the world has changed, and that became even more pronounced this year when COVID hit and forced many people to work from home. Now suddenly having the ability to sign in from anywhere became more important than ever, and they have been doing well, with 2x growth in ARR this year (although he wouldn’t share specific revenue numbers).
As a company getting Series E funding, Kramer doesn’t shy away from the idea of eventually going public, especially since he’s done it twice before, but neither is he ready to commit any time table. For now, he says the company is growing rapidly, with almost 700 customers — and that’s why it decided to take such a large capital influx right now.
Cato currently has 270 employees, with plans to grow to 400 by the end of next year. He says that Cato is a global company with headquarters in Israel, where diversity involves religion, but he is trying to build a diverse and inclusive culture regardless of the location.
“My feeling is that inclusion needs to happen in the earlier stages of the funnel. I’m personally involved in these efforts, at the educational sector level, and when students are ready to be recruited by startups, we are already competitive, and if you look at our employee base it’s very diverse,” Kramer said.
With the new funds, he plans to keep building the company and the product. “There’s a huge opportunity and we want to move as fast as possible. We are also going to make very big investments on the engineering side to take the solution and go to the next level,” he said.
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Kredivo’s parent firm FinAccel raises $90M to expand its credit lending platform in Southeast Asia
Singapore-headquartered FinAccel has secured $90 million in one of the largest funding rounds for a fintech startup in Southeast Asia as it looks to further grow its credit lending app Kredivo and build more financial services.
The financing round, dubbed Series C, for the three-and-a-half-year-old startup was jointly led by Asia Growth Fund — a joint venture between Mirae Asset and Naver — and Square Peg.
Singtel Innov8, TMI (Telkomsel Indonesia), Cathay Innovation, Kejora-InterVest, Mirae Asset Securities, Reinventure and DST Partners participated in the “oversubscribed” financing round, the startup said.
FinAccel said it has raised more than $200 million in debt and equity this year itself. It has raised $140 million in equity to date.
FinAccel operates credit lending app Kredivo in Indonesia, where it has amassed more than a million customers and is growing by a whopping 300% each year, Akshay Garg, chief executive of FinAccel, told TechCrunch in an interview.
The app enables customers to secure credit between $100 and $2,200. If a customer pays it back in full in a month, FinAccel does not charge them any fee. Otherwise, the service levies an interest rate of 2.95%, he explained.
Kredivo’s payments option is also integrated with a number of e-commerce firms, including Lazada and Shoppe, and food delivery startups in Indonesia, so users can quickly access the credit to purchase things and pay the app later.
Credit lending apps are increasingly gaining popularity across the globe, but especially in Southeast Asian markets, where the penetration of credit cards remains low — hence, there are very few people with a traditional credit score. This has created an opportunity for startups to look at other metrics to determine who should get a loan.
FinAccel’s team poses for a picture
Garg said Kredivo looks at a range of data points, including the kind of smartphone model a customer is using, and the apps they have installed on it. “Basically what we’re doing is almost like creating a user profile about the user using a combination of different data signals that come from the existing credit bureaus, the telcos, the e-commerce accounts, the bank accounts and the users themselves,” he said.
“All of that creates a 360-degree overview of the customer that helps us determine the risk factors and decide whether to issue the credit,” he added. As of today, Kredivo is only approving about one-third of the applications it receives.
Jikwang Chung, managing director of Mirae Asset Capital, the strategic investment arm of Mirae Asset, said in a statement that FinAccel is one of the leading companies in Southeast Asia that is able to “combine a strong technology DNA with top-tier risk management and a bold vision of financial inclusion.”
FinAccel, which works with banks to finance the credit to customers, has evaluated more than 3 million applications to date and disbursed nearly 30 million loans. Garg said the startup is now working to develop more financial services, such as low-interest education and healthcare loans.
In the next three to four years, it aims to grow to 10 million users and expand to other Southeast Asian markets such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
A handful of other startups also operate in this space in Indonesia. C88, which also offers credit to customers, last year raised $28 million in a financing round led by Experian.
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Stealth Cybersecurity Startup Fireglass Grabs $20M In Series A
As more and more companies fall victim to security breaches and substantial (and embarrassing) data leaks, cybersecurity startups seem to be profiting at their expense. Cybersecurity companies helping companies not get caught with their pants down raised over $3.3 billion in 2015. The latest firm to join the cash grab is Fireglass, a stealth company that is looking to announce its first… Read More
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