Netskope Comes Out Of Stealth With $21M From Social+Capital And Lightspeed And A “Dream Team” Of Enterprise Vets

The double rise of cloud-based services and consumerization have been two of the biggest developments in enterprise IT, but they have also led to one of the biggest conundrums: IT managers and CIOs who may be happy to see employees switched on and working, but also facing big headaches around managing and monitoring potentially thousands of apps that their people are now using. Today, a new startup called Netskope is launching out of stealth to try to meet that challenge head on, with a new platform that lets companies monitor all of the cloud-based apps that employees use and set security policies to protect against data breaches and more.

Netskope is not your ordinary startup. Out of the gates, it’s launching with $21.4 million in funding from Social+Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. And, it also has what CEO Sanjay Beri described to me as a “dream team” of engineers and others from some of the most impressive enterprise IT startups that Silicon Valley has produced — Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, and PayPal among them — some 55 employees in all.

That $21 million has come in two tranches, both raised with Netskope was still in stealth mode. The first was a $5.5 million seed round from Social + Capital; the second, a $15.9 million round closed earlier this year from Lightspeed. That’s not the only ammunition that the company has: while still under the radar, it was running a private beta, which has produced several paying customers. Two that are being named today are Vegas.com and Universal Music Group, although Beri notes that there are more in the Fortune 500 category, some of which will be revealed in the coming weeks.

The idea behind Netskope is that it assumes that both consumerization — the idea that employees will keep bringing their own ideas to the table in terms of what devices and services they use at work, and many of these will be riffs on what they use at home — and cloud services are inevitable trends. And so rather than trying to tailor IT policy to try to mimic these, the best thing to do is to go along with whatever the employees want to do. Netskope currently is able to support some 3,000 different applications in its service — from the most popular to those less-well-known. What it does, Beri tells me, is that after it is turned on by the IT department, it scans the network and user devices to detect different apps and starts monitoring from there. IT managers can in turn use this to track how information moves, and to set policies to limit usage, warn users of bad practices and so on.

More to come.