Netskope (NTSK) Introduction

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Overview

I recently became aware of Netskope (NTSK). As I have seen only passing comments on this forum, I am sharing my initial research.

What they do

Netskope is a network security platform that offers secure remote access, cloud-hosted application protection, and secure internet access solutions based on zero trust principles.

Summary

  • The Investor Presentation for FY2026Q3 has an excellent overview of the company and its pre-IPO history.
  • As of 2025, Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Secure Services Edge (SSE) for four consecutive years.
  • This is a recent IPO (September 2025) with 1 quarter of public earnings. Many numbers I provide here are from the S-1 IPO filing.
  • The stock price has been a victim of market fear surrounding AI.
  • Primary competitors: Z-Scaler (ZS) and Palo Alto (PANW). Netskope is gaining market share.
  • YoY Revenue Growth: 33%
  • EPS FY2026Q3: $-.10
  • Positive Free Cash Flow
  • Gross Margin 75%, +5% YoY, with a target of 80%
  • Current guidance is very conservative for two reasons: (1) new public company, and (2) billing was recently changed from from multi-year contracts to annual.
  • Technology alliances with Microsoft (MSFT) and CrowdStrike (CRWD).
  • Strong focus on R&D, particularly related to AI security requirements.

Searching the web for more information about Netskope, I countered one article by Contrary Research that has a nice overview of the company. Primarily, information from the S-1 filing and first public earnings release, but also a fair bit of added detail to help understand the company.

Personal Thoughts … Some notable concerns / risks:

  • Not yet profitable. Though if it seems likely non-GAAP profitability will be possible within 1 - 2 years, particularly if they reach their goal of 80% gross margins.
  • The stock price is a victim of AI fears. Valid or not is irrelevant, the company must overcome that market fear in order for the stock price to go up. That will be very challenging for a new IPO that is not yet profitable.
  • The company is focused heavily on R&D. While I view this as necessary to stay relevant with AI changing the world, especially in a small company, it also adds a high degree of uncertainty and will likely delay profitability.
  • Zscaler (ZS) and Palo Alto (PANW) are competitors. Netskope seems to offer a different type of solution to the same security task, but I do not know enough about cybersecurity to determine the growth potential for Netskope in the face of this competition.
  • I am always highly skeptical of a recent IPO.

I have no position in the company at this time.

Neskope (NTSK) Company Overview

Website: https://www.netskope.com/
IPO Date: 2025-09-18
S-1 IPO Filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2063196/000095017025110855/ck0002063196-20250822.htm

Company Overview:

Our Mission from Investor Relations

Netskope’s mission is to help organizations successfully modernize their businesses for the era of cloud and AI. Netskope converges critical security, network, and analytics capabilities into Netskope One, a powerful, unified platform, whose unique architecture of Netskope One applies zero trust principles and AI innovations to optimize access, protect data, stop threats, and enable secure, work-from-anywhere connectivity.

Thousands of customers, including more than 30 of the Fortune 100, trust the Netskope One platform, its Zero Trust Engine, and its powerful NewEdge network to reduce risk and gain full visibility and control over cloud, AI, SaaS, web, and private applications—providing security and accelerating performance without trade-offs.

Finances

NOTES:

  • FY2026Q3 is the only quarter with earnings data as a publicly traded company.
  • FY2026Q4 is the high end of provided guidance.
  • FY2025Q1 through FY2025Q2 are from the IPO S-1 SEC filing.
Revenue Fiscal Quarter
Fiscal Year 1 2 3 4 Total
2025 $ 120,997 $ 130,253 $ 138,532 $ 148,486 $ 538,268
2026 $ 157,736 $ 170,758 $ 184,173 $ 190,000 $ 702,667
Revenue YoY Growth Fiscal Quarter
Fiscal Year 1 2 3 4
2026 30.36% 31.10% 32.95% 27.96%
Revenue Seq Growth Fiscal Quarter
Fiscal Year 1 2 3 4
2025 7.65% 6.36% 7.19%
2026 6.23% 8.26% 7.86% 3.16%
Free Cash Flow Fiscal Quarter
Fiscal Year 1 2 3 4 Total
2025 $ (66,407) $ (60,100) $ (28,644) $ 4,052 $ (151,099)
2026 $ 17,456 $ (19,653) $ 10,594 $ 8,397

Earnings FY2026Q3 on 2025-12-11

Earnings Release
Investor Presentation

Highlights:

Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Highlights

  • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): ARR grew 34% year-over-year to $754 million as of October 31, 2025.
  • Revenue: Q3 Revenue was $184.2 million, an increase of 33% year-over-year.
  • Gross Profit and Margin: GAAP gross profit was $106.6 million, compared to $91.8 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2025, and GAAP gross margin was 58%, compared to 66% for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP gross profit was $137.6 million, compared to $97.5 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2025, and non-GAAP gross margin was 75%, compared to 70% for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP gross profit excludes $28.6 million in stock-based compensation expense and related taxes, compared to $0.6 million in the prior year period, due primarily to the vesting of certain equity awards in conjunction with the initial public offering.
  • Loss from Operations and Operating Margin: GAAP loss from operations was ($447.0) million, compared to a loss of ($53.8) million for the third quarter of fiscal 2025, and GAAP operating margin was (243%), compared to (39%) for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP loss from operations was ($28.2) million, compared to a loss of ($35.5) million for the third quarter of fiscal 2025, and non-GAAP operating margin was (15%), compared to (26%) for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP loss from operations excludes $416.2 million in stock-based compensation expense and related taxes, compared to $12.3 million in the prior year period, due primarily to the vesting of certain equity awards in conjunction with the initial public offering.
  • Net Loss Per Share: GAAP net loss per share was ($1.85), compared to ($0.72) in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP net loss per share was ($0.10), compared to ($0.37) in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Non-GAAP net loss per share excludes $0.04 for the loss on the change in fair market value of convertible notes, compared to $0.18 in the year ago period. As of October 31, 2025, the weighted average common stock outstanding was 245 million and the fully-diluted share count under the treasury stock method was approximately 506 million.
  • Cash Flow: Net cash generated from operations was $11.2 million, compared to ($10.9) million used in operations in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 and operating cash flow margin was 6%, compared to (8%) in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Free cash flow was $10.6 million, compared to ($28.6) million in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 and free cash flow margin was positive 6%, compared to (21%) in the third quarter of fiscal 2025.
  • Cash, Cash Equivalents, and Marketable Securities: Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at the end of the third quarter was $1.2 billion.

Recent Business Highlights

  • Completed our Initial Public Offering in September, raising $992.2 million in IPO proceeds, net of underwriting discounts and commissions.

  • In addition to being recognized as a Leader in both the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Services Edge (SSE), for four consecutive years and a Leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for SASE platforms for two consecutive years, during Q3 Fiscal 2026, Netskope was also recognized as:

    • A leader in The Forrester Wave™: Secure Access Service Edge Solutions, Q3 2025 report. Netskope was the highest scoring vendor in the report overall and also the highest scoring vendor in Forrester’s “Strength of Offering” category.
    • A Leader in GigaOMs DLP Radar report and SD-WAN Platforms Radar report.

  • Expanded our NewEdge private cloud network with new data centers in Malaysia, Toronto, Hawaii, and Oman to meet growing customer demand. NewEdge now covers close to 80 major metropolitan areas, with over 120 data centers globally, all of which are available to every customer, have full edge compute, and run all services.

  • Announced updates to our Netskope One platform, including:

    • Universal Zero Trust Network Access (UZTNA) enhancements to extend to IoT and OT use cases. Netskope’s UZTNA solution helps customers modernize their networks by enabling the consolidation of legacy technologies beyond just Virtual Private Networking (VPN), to also include Network Access Control (NAC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
    • New AI-powered innovations which improve efficiency and effectiveness of security teams. This includes an integrated AI agent for Netskope One Private Access, which provides insight into an organization’s existing ZTNA network topologies and private application configurations.

  • Deepened our collaboration with Microsoft through enterprise security and AI integrations, including Netskope One integration with Microsoft Purview. In addition, we released Netskope One Advanced SSE for Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access (GSA), and new protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot conversations - including GenAI queries, responses, and AI-generated content - using our market-leading data and threat protection delivered through our new CASB API for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Earnings Call FY2026Q3

Earnings Call Transcript

A few quotes I found noteworthy for understanding the company:

Sanjay Beri, CEO and Co-founder

We do not play marketing games with how many regions or data centers we have. Unlike others, all our regions and data centers are available to every customer, and all have full edge compute and run all services. We also released several new products stemming from our technology alliances with Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Netskope One now uniquely fully integrates with Microsoft Purview, combining Netskope’s deep DLP enforcement with Purview’s data classification policies. We also announced general availability of Netskope One Advanced SSE for Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access and new protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot conversations, including GenAI queries, responses, and AI-generated content, all using our market-leading data and threat protection delivered through our new CASB API for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Together, these integrations help Microsoft customers accelerate their zero-trust journey while protecting users’ data and applications without compromising performance or experience.

Finally, through our strong technology alliance with CrowdStrike, we released a new direct-to-zero trust app, which provides out-of-the-box integration between Netskope One and CrowdStrike Falcon to enable the bidirectional sharing of indicators of compromise without the need for extensive manual integration work by the customer.

Sanjay Beri, CEO and Co-founder

We operate in a market where superior technology matters a lot. We often get asked, “What sets Netskope apart from others? What drives customer adoption and satisfaction, and what fuels our market leadership?” As market analysts and our thousands of customers validate, the core of our differentiation is our technology and the vision that it was born from. Innovation is the heartbeat of Netskope. We are committed to continuing to invest in R&D to drive innovations that expand our industry-leading security networking and analytics platform and help our customers safely unleash the power of cloud and AI to stay ahead of the cybersecurity curve.

Drew Del Matto, CFO

Before I share our guidance for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026, let me briefly outline some factors that should be considered. We plan to focus our investments on innovation as well as growth. This includes hiring engineers and data scientists in focused areas to drive Netskope’s roadmap and innovation strategy. We’ll also continue to focus on hiring and ramping reps to address growing market demand for our cloud security, networking, analytics, and AI solutions. Also, we expect continued improvement in our gross margin as we work toward an 80% target over the long term. The foundational investments we made in building our NewEdge private cloud network allow us to scale efficiently going forward. Also, as a reminder, we are in the midst of a shift in our customers’ billing terms, where our multi-year contracts are now primarily billed annually.

Q&A: Matt Hedberg, Managing Director of Equity Research

Great, guys. All of them, congrats as well. Sanjay, for you, obviously, agents and agentic technology is on everybody’s mind, and it feels like you guys are well-positioned to help customers think through their agentic journey. Just kind of curious on how you think of that piece as part of the growth story here. Thanks, guys.

Sanjay Beri, CEO and Co-founder

I recently did a tour kind of across the world with customers’ prospects and agentic AI, agentic workflows, securing enabling AI top topic. If you look at where we’re positioned, we see the traffic of all of our customers. We see their human traffic, their non-human traffic. All their AI applications go through us. So they could be using ChatGPT, they could be using AI within a SaaS app, an AI agent could be originating that. We see that, and because we understand the language of AI, APIs, we see it at a more granular level than anybody else. We see, oh, they’re using Gemini, a personal instance, and they’re about to say, “Reformat this healthcare data.” Well, guess what? Netskope can stop that, yet still allow them to use that AI, and so I call that the front door of AI.

It’s users, AI agents, applications using LLMs and using AI. We see it, we understand it, we can protect that data, and then we can put guardrails around it. And so absolutely right in our wheelhouse, and it’s a big reason that we’re seeing sort of the success across different verticals that we are.

Q&A: Brad Zelnick, Managing Director of Equity Research

Drew, any help that you can offer in how we should think about ARR and net new ARR seasonality into Q4 and anything we might contemplate maybe even into next year? And I appreciate your comments about all the assumptions and your guidance, but also as a brand new public company, I mean, you guys are growing in excess of 30% at real scale.

I mean, it really stands out, really great, but anything you can do to help calibrate the kind of beats that we might expect going forward would be helpful. Thank you.

Drew Del Matto, CFO

Okay, well, I think there’s a couple of questions there. I think the first question really was on ARR, Brad, so we’re not guiding ARR, but I do think it’s helpful. We may want to just help you a little bit from a modeling perspective. If you look over really the last year, you could see that ARR was growing about a point faster than revenue, so it’s just one way to kind of think about how to think about that, and then also, last Q4 was very strong. It’s a very strong quarter for us, so what I would consider a high bar, and Q3, also a very strong quarter. You just saw ARR accelerating to 34%.

In terms of just the guidance, again, newly public company, we are being prudent. And we also, what Sanjay was just talking about, we have a lot of reps ramping. We continue to hire, and it’s very hard to predict the rate at which we’ll hire and the rate at which they’ll ramp.

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It is nice you brought NTSK to the board here. I have mentioned it a few times on Saul’s board. The ugly market has hit the stock price very hard. Plus you have some insider selling after the IPO last October pressuring the price. I bought NTSK too soon at $20/share grrr but I doubled down last week to a full position. The PS has dropped from 14 to less that 7 in the last 3 months. Market cap has been cut in half but the company has continued to perform (well, we will see in a couple weeks March 11 with the Q4 ER). This company is established player (per Magic Quadrant rating) and is not going away. The accelerated demand coming from agentic AI should be a big tailwind in 2026 for both ZS and NTSK. NTSK has successfully competed against the big boys such as PAN and ZS the last +5 years. The CASB is a key and is a cloud software component similar to a corporate firewall on drugs. All traffic (user and app) passes through and gets inspected. Further, NTSK has been very active the last 8 years making acquisitions/integrations to keep pace with its platform going against the big boys. The CEO Sanjay Beri, knows the market well and the critical requirement of positive cash flow. I am sure he will discuss earnings on the next ER and I will be listening closely. This next ER is only its second public quarter so IMO very important to get the full picture.

Note there is a great deep dive on Muji’s board and also from Bert Hochfeld on seeking alpha. Here is my post from a couple months ago.

Blockquote NTSK - Netskope has evolved from CASB to SSE to SASE over the past few years through acquisitions and aggressive development. This was necessary to have their platform stay relevant against top competitors NET, PANW, and ZS. NTSK continues to be a top leader per Gardner Magic Quadrant. NTSK is a mini ZS growing ARR at a slightly faster pace than NET and ZS. NTSK started out as a just a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), a middle-man service between enterprise users and the enterprise servers that they use on a day-to-day basis. This location in the middle allowed enterprises to gain visibility into SaaS app usage patterns. The 2026 catalyst to NTSK (and NET and ZS) should be the explosion in agentic AI app traffic that needs securing. All boats should float in this segment. I see NTSK being smaller but growing faster than ZS. Dunno about NET as it is so formidable at the network edge. NET is always just too expensive, blablabla but may be a better safer bet. NTSK had its first public ER a couple weeks ago after an October IPO. The stock shot up to ~$22 and now has fallen to under ~$19. I’ll be buying some more and will be watching in the next ER to see if their non-GAAP net losses have improved proportionally with the revenue increases. I do not think Wall Street has taken notice of this stock yet. BTW Muji has a nice deep dive NTSK review on his web site.

-zane

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Here is my Netskope deep dive from the time of their IPO, if anyone is curious: A look at Netskope

They are an SASE/SSE provider whose primary competitor is Zscaler. My concern was mostly that they look a lot like SentinelOne, a fast follower (of CrowdStrike in that case) that shows little hope of taking more share. Like S1, they are way behind Zscaler’s level of growth when that giant was at Netskope’s size. I likely would have been very interested in this company in 2019-2021, but not today.

[Side note: If you own Zscaler, don’t get fooled by its “acceleration” of late, which is entirely due to its acquisition of MDR provider RedCanary. They continue to decelerate in their core organic business.]

This company remains deeply unprofitable (in both GAAP and non-GAAP), and a billing change is goosing FCF.

NSTK has reported 2 quarters since IPO and my piece…

Q326: https://investors.netskope.com/news-releases/news-release-details/netskope-announces-strong-third-quarter-fiscal-year-2026

  • Revenue +33.0%
  • ARR +33.9%, large customers +36%
  • RPO +41%
  • FCF positive (6%) for the 3rd time in 4Qs, TTM swung positive
  • Rule of 40 TTM rose to 33
  • NRR 118%

Q426: https://investors.netskope.com/news-releases/news-release-details/netskope-announces-strong-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2026

  • Revenue +32.2%
  • ARR +31.2%
  • RPO +35.8%, cRPO +29.4%
  • FCF positive (2%)
  • Rule of 40 TTM rose to 34
  • NRR 116%

The stock has done very poorly since IPO, and is down -56%. It has thankfully bounced off lows in late March, so perhaps this is a decent entry point.

-muji

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Yes down big time and I am sucking an egg. I do believe this a great entry price and it will recover nicely as quarterly ER revenue/cash flow performance and its market position becomes apparent. A triple whammy to the price: the IPO blackout expired in early April, the war impact, and the ‘all SaaS stocks suck’ brain virus. None of this pullback is performance based but it does have strong competitors e.g. PAN, CRWD, etc. NTSK is an AI security company with a well positioned platform of services not just the CASB. It notably intercepts and addresses growing agentic AI traffic that is typically from 3rd parties.

Agentic traffic pricing is based upon transactions not seat based. The industry spent years building third-party risk programs, vendor assessments, SOC 2 reviews, contractor access policies, offboarding checklists. All to answer one question: if this external entity was compromised, what would be the impact to my organization? The same question needs to be asked about AI agents.

Attribution is effectively invisible. In most environments, an AI agent’s actions are indistinguishable from the service account the agent is riding on. There’s no way to tie a specific action back to a specific agent identity, the human who triggered the action, or the chain of delegation that granted access. Agentic traffic is especially hard to manage for security. I am hoping this will add a little tailwind to NTSK.

I did double down on my previous NTSK purchase for currently a 2% position.

-zane

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With the guidance posted above, the projected 20% revenue growth for 2027 takes Netskope out of the hypergrowth category. What is the basis for your continued holds?

Thanks, Gray

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Yes, the 2027 revenue guidance at 23% is weak but is likely sandbagging. 2027 Q1 forecast is 27% revenue growth which includes a hit to FCF as they transition to annual billings method. Historically, NTSK the last 3 years has achieved +32% revenue growth YOY and has beaten their guidance. Mr. Market dinged NTSK Q4 after softer than expected beats in NRR, soft guide, and upcoming lockout expiry.

The Q4 2026 presentation sustaining titles highlight the goal going forward is 30%+. And they highlight the IDC estimated TAM for 2028 increasing from $130B to $149B due to newly added Gen AI Security opportunities. The Gardner Magic Quadrant identifies NTSK as the leader in SASE and SSE. Marketscope identified NTSK as the leader DLP. NTSK has 25 security products in its platform and 22% growth with existing customers.

Given their market leadership position, I think NTSK in 2027 will achieve 30%+ growth along with improving margins and FCF. Again I think the unknown tailwind is what they are calling Gen AI Security opportunities which is appears to be accelerating in the current super cycle. This Gateway Agentic AI and all 4 new AI products are transaction based pricing and could provide higher growth. The new Index AI product provides visibility in the AI traffic traversing the network edge.

First, it all comes down to whether you think NTSK is a key beneficiary of the the AI super cycle and their numbers are sandbagged. Second, how will they compete against the much larger PANW and ZS, as these companies go after the last generation legacy security installations. A more conservative tack is to stay with PANW and ZS.

-zane

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You are rounding down a bit. FY27 initial guide was for $876M or +23.6% growth.

They just IPO’d 2 quarters ago, so this is really the first exposure we’ve had to forward annual guidance from this mgmt team. With the typical beat and raise SaaS mentality, this is likely saying FY27 will be 28-30%.

Is that hypergrowth? Depends on where your line is. But that is higher growth than other next-gen security providers CRWD, PANW, and ZS are currently seeing (albeit at much larger scale).

If you recall, Saul’s credo on guidance was basically to ignore it, knowing that mgmt likes to sandbag with easily obtainable targets.

As for what I am watching w/ NTSK:

  • Positives: slight acceleration from 30% to 32% level, large customers & EU growing faster, record net new ARR, op leverage showing (+5pp in GAAP GM, +18pp in TTM non-GAAP op margin)
  • Neutral: FY27 guide at 24% (likely sandbag), hitting TTM FCF positive (due to billing chg, and will be lumpy in 1H27)
  • Negatives: not at Rule of 40 TTM (now at 34), dip in NRR (-2pp seq to 116%), long way from even non-GAAP profitability

-m

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BTW: if you are investing in the SASE/SSE space, my bet continues to be on Cloudflare (NET), who brings a lot of optionality beyond SASE in core app security, cloud dev in Act 3 (Workers, R2, and AI), and possibly an Act 4 (content tollbooth features).

Cloudflare has re-accelerated over last 3 quarters to growth rates a touch higher than Netskope (+33.6%), and just guided next FY to +29%.

Zscaler has also accelerated (off a +21% growth rate 2 quarter ago), but don’t let that fool you - it’s mostly from their acquisition of Red Canary. I estimate organic growth of ~20%, as I noted in my NTSK take linked above.

As of the latest quarter:

Metric NET ZS NTSK
Revenue Growth YoY +33.6% +25.9%* +32.2%
ARR ~$2.5B* $3.4B $0.8B
FY guide +28.9% +24.3%* +23.6%
NRR 120% ? 116%
Rule of 40 TTM 42 53 34
MCap $72B $21B $4B

Note: Zscaler’s growth is boosted by acquisition of Red Canary, and they stopped reporting NRR over a year ago (last given as 114%). ARR for Cloudflare is implied (current rev x 4).

Of course, Cloudflare has a eye boggling market cap, but are seeing better growth rates than Netskope at 3x the scale. Zscaler continues to be a cash machine and has the better Rule of 40 TTM, but again, the Red Canary guide is masking things a bit.

SASE is also one of the areas of Palo Alto Networks, who are like a CrowdStrike+Zscaler, and now adding a +Okta with CyberArk acquisition. They sit at an even greater $140B market cap, and are currently seeing 15% overall growth – however their next-gen security segment is at a +33% growth rate, similar to Cloudflare.

I recommend this recent thread that cross compares these companies: Year end 2025 Cyber security update!

-muji

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Thanks to you and Muji for your responses, which seemed to suggest my question was a criticism. It was not. I am heavily a numbers guy, and when they do not seem to support the actions being taken by the community I admire, I attempt to understand the nature of the disconnect in my conclusions..

Gray

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A note on valuation comparisons using P/S since NTSK has no earnings;

P/S
CRWD 24
NET 33
ZS 7
NTSK 3

NTSK is much smaller, unprofitable, and has a lot to prove in its business. It is not growing faster than its primary competitors but all boats are floating higher. I am not sure NTSKs technical leadership scores (SSE/SASE) from the various sources really gives it much of an edge. It just opens the door to a customer along with the big guys, a place at the table. Media sources tout its lower cost of ownership and price advantage over the premium priced competitors. I do not not have any confirming data.

NTSKs Agentic AI new 4 products sound very good to me but it is hard to make a comparison with the competitors. Certainly the CEO is calling this out as a NTSK advantage and selling point. Maybe Muji has a feel for this from his deep dives.

Netskope One Agentic Broker - This is the flagship product for managing autonomous AI agents. It acts as a security intermediary that decodes and monitors interactions between AI agents and enterprise data.
Netskope One AI Guardrails - This product focuses on the content of AI interactions and attack injections and data loss to ensure they remain safe and compliant.
Netskope One AI Gateway - Designed for organizations building their own AI infrastructure and enforcing security policies for private AI applications.
Netskope One AI Red Teaming - A proactive security tool for that simulates adversarial attacks on an organization’s AI models and agents.

-zane

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Yep, Netskope just released the various pieces that pivot their own WAF/DLP services towards non-human AI agents. This shift into AI security products is being done by all SASE competitors here, and I’d actually say Netskope was a bit late to the party.

SASE platforms help enterprises control access (SSE) and networking (SD-WAN) for human users, and its an easy pivot into overseeing non-human “AI” users as well. This is a good move for all these platform, which can now promote Zero Trust access and Data Protection as highly relevant to help secure AI agents as they access sensitive data and services.

Cloudflare has been moving this way for years now. They first announced AI Gateway in 2023 as a way to corral enterprise AI access, and Firewall for AI in 2024 as a pivot of their WAF/NGFW. This was all combined into a Cloudflare for AI line a year ago that looks like what Netskope just announced this month. In March, that AI firewall went GA and is now called “AI Security For Apps”. They released more agentic AI features in their “Agents Week” this month, with a bunch of other AI relevant products (Containers-at-the-edge & sandbox, Email Service, Workers for dynamic code execution, coding storage layer, agentic web browsing service, etc). Again, they have a lot of optionality here with their Workers layer adding programmability to all of this, as a huge differentiator. One example of this is how they are now leveraging their SASE with Workers AI within a private & secure enterprise network dubbed “Cloudflare Mesh”, where your agent and its traffic can all live on Cloudflare’s network.

Zscaler pushed AI security last year, including a new AI-SPM. In January, they rebranded all this as their “AI Security” suite, which include visibility & tracking features (that sound like an AI Gateway, without calling it such) over their SASE platform – which were acquired in November via SPLX. This new product line will assuredly be a top subject at their coming conference in June, which they are calling “the conference for AI Security”.

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