Perimeter 81 Scores $100 Million on $1 Billion Valuation

Perimeter 81, a provider of zero trust network access (ZTNA) software, has scored $100 million in Series C funding led by B Capital. The round brings the company’s valuation to over $1 billion and its total funding raised to about $165 million.

The funding indicates the growing importance of the market for ZTNA, which Futuriom values at over $10 billion. Indeed, the technology, which approaches the authentication of network users by placing zero trust in any user until they're adequately identified through a variety of techniques, has become the leading network security paradigm.

Perimeter 81’s ZTNA Approach

Perimeter 81, founded in 2018 in Tel Aviv by Amit Bareket and Sagi Gidali, approaches ZTNA as part of a secure access service edge (SASE) environment, a definition Perimeter 81 has recast as security service edge (SSE). (SSE, says Perimeter 81, is the security network for SASE.) Like SASE, SSE is based on an architecture in which management, control, and data planes are separated via software, allowing for the implementation of multiple security techniques.

For example, Perimeter 81 provides ZTNA as a service, along with firewall-as-a-service and secure web gateway (SWB), using an agentless approach based on a software-defined perimeter (SDP). Access is granted not by IP address or location but by more granular and personally identifiable policies. Once on the network, users are subject to restricted “least privilege” access. The result is a software-based virtual private network (VPN) that Perimeter 81 maintains is an ”impenetrable tunnel” between users and the company’s resources.

Perimeter 81 maintains that its SSE approach is easier to implement and more secure than traditional VPN connections. “Perimeter 81’s agentless VPN was the main reason we decided to adopt Perimeter 81 in our company,” said Peter Hecko, Lead DevOps Engineer at Hims & Hers Health Inc., in a prepared statement. “It helped us to remove our applications from the internet while making it very easy for our users to access them without the IT overhead we would have if a VPN client installation and maintenance would be required.”

Growing Fast

Perimeter 81 claims to have over 2,400 customers. The company numbers about 250 employees across three offices worldwide in Tel Aviv, New York City, and Los Angeles and is hiring positions in all locations.

“[T]his funding will support our rapid growth and accelerate hiring and development, furthering our disruption of the network security market,” wrote co-founders Bareket and Gidali in a blog. “The rise of remote work, cloud adoption, fiber, and 5G has created a fundamental shift in the network security landscape, leading companies to replace their on-premises network and security appliances with a secure corporate network over the internet.”

Perimeter 81 is riding a rising tidal wave of ZTNA firms, including Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM), Axis Security, Cato Networks, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) , Google, Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), NetFoundry, Okta (Nasdaq: OKTA), VMware (NYSE: VMW), and Zscaler, to name just a few. The resulting competition, along with federal mandates supporting ZTNA, continue to strengthen products and services.

In addition to B Capital, Perimeter 81’s Series C featured participants Insight Partners, Toba Capital, ION Crossover Ventures, Entrée Capital and Spring Ventures.