The recent news headlines may be pointing out the market crisis and quoting prophecies of rage, but in actuality, Israeli startups continue to recruit, some even with particularly high valuations. Today (Monday), the Israeli startup Perimeter 81 announced the completion of a new $100 million round of funding, with a valuation of $1 billion, to develop a product that will replace VPNs and firewalls.

Who needs a firewall or VPN?

Although Perimeter 81 was established 4 years ago, its product is particularly relevant to the "new normal" with the transition to work from home, cafe, or anywhere else, aka a situation where "the Internet is the new corporate network" as Perimeter 81 calls it. Existing security solutions such as firewalls or VPNs are no longer relevant, and this is where the company's product comes into play.

The Perimeter 81 product enables organizations to build a secure enterprise network over an edge cloud in an easy, fast, simple and secure way, and does so by replacing the old hardware-based VPN solutions with zero-trust architecture (ZTNA); a modern alternative to the traditional firewall – Firewall-As-A Service– designed to ensure access to the organization only to authorized users; a solution for securing Internet access (Secure Web Gateway) and protecting employees when surfing the Internet; interconnection between offices - SDWAN and replacement of expensive communication solutions such as MPLS; and finally, a Posture Assessment solution, designed to test the validity of the device from which the user logged in, and designed to prevent password theft attacks.

In a conversation with Geektime, Amit Bareket, CEO, and co-founder of Perimeter 81, also gloats about the on-boarding process of the company, which he says allows employees to start working easily and a unique go-to-market approach that allows for hundreds of new customers each month.

Regardless, you operate in the SASE market, which is fairly saturated, especially with several Israeli competitors. What makes your product better than CATO for example, or TWINGATE products?

"I do not want to comment on any competitor– everyone has good products, and we are happy that there is competition in the Israeli ecosystem. An important and strategic element that Perimeter 81 has is the cloud network: today only a few companies have this ability like ours. We emphasize building excellent products, and the company has more than 2,400 organizations as customers, which is a significant competitive advantage. Also because of the many use cases and the work our teams had with them, coupled with a high understanding of product-market fit based on our close work with customers and partners, we seem to stand out.”

Another advantage is the way the platform was built – both from an architecture and network standpoint– which Bareket says emphasizes the user interface, "from which comes the ease and availability of building the organizational infrastructure for the customer."

Perimeter 81 was founded in 2018 and currently employs about 250 employees in offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Los Angeles. According to the company's data, it serves about 2,400 customers. This venture is the founding partners, Amit Barkat and Sagi Gidley, second venture as they also co-founded SaferVPN, which was sold to the American corporation J2 about 3 years ago. Today, as stated, the company announces a $100 million C round of funding, led by the American fund B-Capital, with the participation of ION Crossover Ventures, Toba Capital, Insight Partners, and Entree Capital. Among the existing investors in the company: Spring Ventures, led by Aviv Refuah, and private investors. The company's total funding to date now stands at $165 million.