How SentinelOne is adapting to the fast-changing cybersecurity landscape

SentinelOne co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten joins Yahoo Finance to discuss SentinelOne’s market debut and its plans to push for control in cybersecurity as they focus on autonomous detection of cyberattacks.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne raised about $1.23 billion in an upsized IPO today. That valued the company at nearly $9 billion, a strong valuation that reflects robust investor appetite for cybersecurity plays. Tomer Weingarten is the co-founder and CEO of SentinelOne and joins us right now down at the New York Stock Exchange.

Tomer, congratulations on the IPO. I'm sure it's a big day for you and the team. So your company focuses on the autonomous detection of cyber attacks. What exactly is that?

TOMER WEINGARTEN: Yeah. You know, it's a way to basically detect attacks as they happen in real time, and then have a system that has no need in human assistance to actually deflect these attacks, preventing them completely and sometimes even being able to remediate them just by looking and stitching together all the activities that happen on any given device and then reverting them back. So it's a, once again, a complete human-free system to actually deflect attacks at any given scale, which is also one of the reasons why we're working with some of the biggest enterprises out there, you know, securing millions of devices. So that's really what we do.

MYLES UDLAND: Tomer, how have things changed for your business just in the last few months? We've had a couple of very high profile hacks that we've covered here with public companies involved. And I'm just curious what the demand, the incoming that you guys have gotten has been like in the last few months in the run-up to this IPO.

TOMER WEINGARTEN: Yeah. You know, the entire past couple of years, I would say, have really demonstrated a very robust demand environment. I mean, even the COVID pandemic really put more emphasis on device protection, when all of us kind of left the workplace environment, moved with our devices back home. All these layers of defense that we typically have when we go into the office have vanished and really device protection took like a front and center seat. And then you see these waves of attacks. So that's even compounding the need for improved protection further.

With each and every one of these attacks, it's always a failure of an existing incumbent endpoint protection solution. So you know, our place right now is one of these most critical junctions in cybersecurity. So we see that fuels a lot of tailwinds in our business. But at the same time, you know, it's a massive shift that it's been ongoing for a while now. The face of the network is changing completely. And all these trends are obviously fairly positive for our business.

BRIAN SOZZI: Tomer, a new survey out this morning from Armis, and they found 71% of workers returning to the office planned to bring their work from home devices back into the office, and 54% of them don't think there's any risk associated with doing so. What's your message to workers that are going to do this? And then do you also expect a spike in cyber attacks as offices reopen?

TOMER WEINGARTEN: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, I mean, I don't see as well any dramatic change in the return to to work from the office. But that m it's not like the situation right now is that great, right. I mean, I think that at the end of the day, the emphasis on endpoint protection is the right one. I mean, we just need to gain control over all of these devices in the enterprise, both the endpoint devices, which are the laptops and desktops, but at the same time, you know, think about all these enterprises transitioning to the cloud and the immense tech footprint that that exposes into the cloud, cloud security, and the workloads that they're all hosting in the cloud, that becomes an extension of their perimeter. And then you go to all other IoT devices on these same networks.

So obviously, you're looking at a proliferation of devices across the network. All of them need security. I think it doesn't really matter where you're doing your work from. It really is your identity, the device you're using, and the data you're trying to access. That's kind of also the model of zero trust, which is something that I think we've heard a lot about in the past few months or maybe last year. That is really how the network is shaping to be is these three pillars, devices, the identity, and overall the cloud and data access, you know, that's what you need to secure if you're looking to become with just a better elevated security posture.

BRIAN SOZZI: All right. Tomer Weingarten, co-founder and CEO of SentinelOne. Congratulations on the transaction. We'll talk to you soon.