Cato Turns Backbone Into Scale Advantage
Cato Networks
Cato’s backbone turns fixed network spend into a scale advantage, because the hard cost of running PoPs and backbone links gets spread across more customer traffic while each customer can buy more software on top. That is closer to how a cloud platform works than how a firewall vendor works. The same network that carries a branch office tunnel can also enforce SWG, ZTNA, CASB, DLP, and XDR policies, so more usage and more modules both lift monetization on largely the same infrastructure footprint.
-
Cato’s network now spans 85 plus PoPs worldwide, with each PoP running the same software stack and connecting into a private backbone with uptime and performance SLAs. That means incremental traffic does not require rebuilding the architecture from scratch, it mainly fills existing capacity more efficiently.
-
The contrast with Zscaler is concrete. Zscaler integrates with SD-WAN partners like Cisco and Aruba, which keeps its model lighter but often leaves networking and security split across vendors. Cato captures both the network path and the security spend in one bill, which gives it more room for revenue expansion per account.
-
That expansion is already visible in scale. Cato reported more than $350M in ARR in 2025, up 43% year over year, and serves more than 4,000 organizations. As customers consolidate multiple vendors onto one platform, account revenue can rise faster than the backbone cost needed to serve them.
Going forward, the companies that own both the traffic path and the policy engine should compound fastest in SASE. As Cato adds more security modules and fills more of its backbone, the model should look increasingly like a high gross margin software business built on top of a scaled private network.