SentinelOne Has ‘Zero Reasons’ To Consider A Sale, CEO Says
Co-Founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten responds to reports that had suggested the cybersecurity vendor might be up for sale, saying the company is ‘fully committed’ to staying independent.
With SentinelOne’s strong results from both its business growth and product innovation, there’s no impetus for the cybersecurity vendor to put itself up for sale, SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten said Tuesday.
“We’re fully committed to our independent path,” Weingarten said during a session at the 2023 XChange Best of Breed Conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company in Atlanta.
[Related: SentinelOne’s MSSP Partners Are Driving ‘Standout Growth’: CEO Tomer Weingarten]
In doing so, SentinelOne is also “fully committed to you,” he said, addressing the audience of C-level executives from major solution and service providers. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company generates 100 percent of its revenue through channel partners, and in its most recent quarter, beat analyst estimates by growing revenue 46 percent year-over-year to reach $149.4 million.
Weingarten, who co-founded SentinelOne in 2013, responded to a question from CRN editors about an August Reuters report that the company was mulling the possibility of a sale — following a significant decline in its market capitalization since going public in 2021.
“I don’t see the reason to do anything like that. I don’t see the reason to move away from my independent path,” he said. “We are the No. 1 innovator in this space. We’ve got $1 billion in cash on our balance sheet. We’ve trimmed our losses in such a significant way that next year we’re going to [shift] into cash-flow positivity.”
In terms of product innovation, Weingarten said that “others have followed” the company in terms of capabilities for AI and behavioral detection. SentinelOne was also the “first company” to combine endpoint protection and EDR (endpoint detection and response) onto one platform, he said — a move that “Microsoft has copied.”
“We put EDR into the cloud, and people have copied,” Weingarten said. All around, “we’ve been highly, highly disruptive,” he said.
Strategy Is ‘Dead-On’
Weingarten’s focus on continually innovating on the SentinelOne security platform and then working with partners to bring the technology to customers is a smart strategy, said Jonathan Lerner, president and CEO of InterVision Systems, No. 99 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.
“He’s a technologist developing the right solutions. He partners where his core isn’t. And he really is committed to his craft — building better IP and technology, cloud-first,” Lerner said. “I think it’s dead-on.”
Chesterfield, Mo.-based InterVision is a SentinelOne partner and has been getting strong traction with its midmarket customers for its services delivered around the SentinelOne platform, according to Lerner.
‘We Don’t Get Pressurized’
During the session Tuesday, Weingarten said that SentinelOne has received numerous “overtures” since its founding a decade ago.
“Pretty much every security vendor you can fathom, at some point, approached me and said, ‘Hey, what about potentially doing something?’” he said. “That was never an appealing thing for me — nor did I think it’s going to be something that’s serving for our customers, serving for our partners. And none of that has changed.”
Ultimately, “I practically have zero reasons to ever contemplate selling the company,” Weingarten said. “I think a lot of it is coming from folks that are maybe a bit disappointed about our reaction and our desire to stay independent. And they thought that [report] could have [put] more pressure on us. We don’t get pressurized. That’s the work that we do every day.”