Palo Alto – June, 2022 – Woodside Capital Partners acted as exclusive financial advisor to WootCloud, a Zero Trust IoT Security innovator, on their acquisition by Netskope, the leader in Security Service Edge (SSE) space.

The acquisition brings to Netskope WootCloud’s award-winning HyperContext® Security Platform, which provides end-to-end visibility, context, and threat remediation for managed and unmanaged devices, and will extend Netskope’s acclaimed SSE and Zero Trust capabilities to protect enterprise IoT devices at scale.

“Over the last couple of years, Woodside Capital Partners has successfully established itself as a leading capital raise and M&A partner for emerging Cybersecurity companies where nuanced storytelling is mandatory in a very fragmented market. We partnered with the WootCloud team, who had already developed a proven foundation for the next generation of IoT Zero Trust Security, to help them find a partner that would help them scale their solution to its fullest potential. We congratulate both teams on this very successful outcome.”, said Nishant Jadhav, Managing Director at Woodside Capital Partners.

The massive volume of Internet-connected devices continues to expand; by 2025, there will be 55.7 billion connected IoT devices (“things”), generating almost 80B zettabytes (ZB) of data. WootCloud technology will enable Netskope customers to support both user- and device-centric policies with Zero Trust principles applied to govern access and interactions with critical data. As Gartner® notes, by 2026, 50% of organizations will prioritize advanced data security features for inspection of data at rest and in motion as a selection criterion for SSE, up from 15% in 2021.

Founded in 2016 in San Jose, Calif., WootCloud offers device discovery, classification, and control to help customers gain deep visibility and context into all devices on their networks (both managed and unmanaged) and provide a risk and threat assessment measurement for devices that can be leveraged within a broader IoT security strategy. WootCloud’s cloud-based platform is capable of collecting billions of daily measurements of device characteristics, and this telemetry data is further analyzed using proprietary AI/ML models for device classification, risk assessment, and threat detection.

WootCloud critical uses cases include:
Device classification and visibility to discover managed and unmanaged devices, classify and provide contextual information, and provide deep insights that “true-up” an asset inventory
Device Risk, dynamically ascertained by continuous real-time monitoring to detect malicious behavior, and exchange device attributes with security operations tools for remedial actions.
Access control and segmentation to offer dynamic asset grouping, automate network segmentation, and facilitate various actions using existing Network Access Control (NAC), firewalls, access points, and other technologies
Cybersecurity asset management to drive compliance with corporate policies and gain insights into license use, helping to optimize the total IT environment

“Securing a hybrid work environment includes the ability to establish adaptive zero trust across users, devices, networks, applications, and data— increasing confidence in policy enforcement everywhere,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope. “WootCloud’s innovative technology will further extend Netskope’s industry-leading SSE and Zero Trust capabilities, ensuring that critical data is protected from the network, to the cloud, to enterprise IoT devices.”

“Netskope is an unquestioned leader in Security Service Edge and Zero Trust, and it makes perfect sense to combine and extend our collective capabilities to protect enterprise IoT devices at scale,” said Amit Srivastav, CEO of WootCloud. “We are so proud of what we have achieved with WootCloud, and we are excited to join Netskope for this next stage of the growth journey.”

Zero Trust principles are critical to the implementation of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), which converges critical security, networking, and business value requirements into one technology architecture. Gartner cites that, by 2025, at least 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption encompassing user, branch and edge access, up from 10% in 2020. Properly implemented SSE, which describes the security stack needed to enable SASE architecture, fundamentally includes zero trust and transforms what enterprises can achieve for security at scale.
Financial terms of the acquisition are undisclosed. WootCloud CEO Amit Srivastav has joined Netskope as an Executive Advisor to the CEO, and all of the WootCloud engineering team, led by the original founding CEO Srinivas Akella, have joined Netskope’s engineering organization.

About Wootcloud
WootCloud’s mission is to automate device security at IoT scale. WootCloud HyperContext® is an agentless, device focused, network segmentation, access control, and threat response platform  that automates enterprise security at IoT scale. A privately held company, WootCloud is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in India and Argentina. Learn more at wootcloud.com.

About Netskope
Netskope, a global cybersecurity leader, is redefining cloud, data, and network security to help organizations apply Zero Trust principles to protect data. The Netskope Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE) platform is fast, easy to use, and secures people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Netskope helps customers reduce risk, accelerate performance, and get unrivaled visibility into any cloud, web, and private application activity. Thousands of customers, including more than 25 of the Fortune 100, trust Netskope to address evolving threats, new risks, technology shifts, organizational and network changes, and new regulatory requirements. Learn how Netskope helps customers be ready for anything on their SASE journey, visit netskope.com.