SentinelOne CMO Daniel Bernard
A week ago, NYSE-listed cybersecurity company SentinelOne launched S Ventures Fund worth US$100 million to invest in the next generation of security and data companies startups.
The fund, which seeks to invest across all stages, will focus on security and data companies that bring innovative use cases to the Singularity Marketplace. It is SentinelOne’s open application ecosystem that allows security teams to extend Singularity extended detection and response (XDR) use cases.
The firm has already invested in Armorblox and Noetic Cyber.
SentinelOne CMO Daniel Bernard was in Singapore recently and spoke to e27 about S Ventures and investment opportunities in the Asia Pacific market.
Edited excerpts:
Can you give us a brief about SentinelOne?
SentinelOne is a cybersecurity firm specialising in XDR, meaning our tech protects endpoints, cloud and identity. We pioneered behavioural AI. It lets us monitor every single process happening on an attack surface. Understand using AI when something is malicious, take action to stop it, and remediate and reverse it — all without human intervention. That’s something we call autonomous cybersecurity.
Sentinel has more than 9,000 customers around the world. We went public last June on the New York Stock Exchange and have about 2,000 employees. Just over 30 per cent of our revenue comes from international markets.
We have teams in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, India, and South Korea. We have hundreds of customers in the region. We are in every vertical, from airlines, banks, healthcare providers, manufacturers, transportation companies, shipping companies and logistics to pharmaceutical.
What was the motivation behind setting up S Ventures? What are the fund’s objectives?
We created S Ventures because we want to do our part to invest in innovators, disruptors and promising founders. Part of XDR is that it integrates our cybersecurity platform into various other products and use cases.
Also Read: Why firms need a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity
We view this in two ways. 1) From an investment perspective, we can have an opportunity to invest in the next generation of exciting and innovative companies. 2) we have an exciting opportunity to help our customers and propel our growth through integrating with these companies and leveraging them to help Singularity XDR evolve and do more for our customers.
How do you differentiate from other crybersecurity funds in the market?
From a funding perspective, what makes us unique is we have the industry’s most cutting-edge XDR platform. We have over 9,000 customers, and there are a lot of companies out there looking to plug into a partner that can help them get clear that can help cybersecurity be a part of their go-to-market, and they’re offering set.
What is the structure of S Ventures? Do you have any external LPs in the fund?
It is a fund owned and operated by SentinelOne. It doesn’t have any other partners.
We invest in companies all around the world. So we’ll look at companies opportunistically in Southeast Asia as well. We’ve already invested in companies in the US and nothing in Southeast Asia yet. So far. We have four investments that we’ve announced – one each in the US and Israel.
What is S Ventures’s investment philosophy?
We are looking at cybersecurity innovation and data innovation area because our philosophy is that data is really at the centre of cybersecurity. It means we train our AI models and empower our technology with data. Attackers are looking to exfiltrate data. So we’re looking for not only cybersecurity companies that disrupt, innovate and change things but are also looking at interesting innovators in the data space and how data is understood, how we leverage data to make decisions, etc.
What is the average cheque size? How many companies do you plan to invest in from this point?
So far, the cheque sizes have been sub-US$5 million. We have the flexibility to do what we want to do with this fund. We’re not looking to lead rounds. We are looking to either invest alongside other investors or make strategic investments opportunistically.
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The number of deals depends on how big the cheques we write and the companies we see. We can support many companies with a US$100 million fund and a cheque size of US$5 million. We can help them grow and use our expertise.
Do you see any exciting opportunities for S Ventures in Southeast Asia?
We are looking at the market, and there’s a lot of innovation going on here. And we will want to see more cybersecurity companies coming from Southeast Asia. We don’t care about markets; if an innovator is doing something interesting here in Southeast Asia, we will invest in it. It is the same for other markets, be it the US or France. So it is all about the technology, the team, and the opportunity.
What are some trends you read in the region’s cybersecurity industry?
We see a trend for desired automation. The tools in the market today have been there for decades. They produce too many alerts and ultimately create too much human work for cybersecurity teams. So automation is one trend.
The second trend is consolidation and simplification. In general, our customers are looking for companies to help them replace multiple technologies with one solution that can do more and make it easier for them to operate.
The third is cloud security. Most of the last decades have focused on securing devices and attack surfaces that are more on-premise.
With the explosion over the last decade or so of cloud services — be it SaaS apps, storage in the cloud or cloud marketplaces — we see the customer looking for new ways or purpose-built cloud security.
From a cybersecurity perspective, the Asian market still uses legacy tools. So there will be a huge revolution here as the region’s largest companies, and even SMEs modernise, revolutionise, and come up to the global standard. That’s why leading legacy anti-virus and legacy database on-prem technologies are going for cloud-based technologies like SentinelOne with Singularity XDR.
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