Security Financings Continue Their Heat Wave With A New $75M Round For Netskope

Netskope, which sells a technology service protecting businesses’ cloud-based software, has joined the ranks of the massively funded (and potentially overfunded?) security technology companies with a new $75 million round of financing.

The Los Altos, Calif.-based company joins a not-so-exclusive club of security companies that have raised at least $50 million since the dog days of summer began. Since August, two companies, Zscaler and Tanium, have raised $100 million and $120 million, respectively, in rounds led by the private equity firm TPG.

Leading the financing charge into Netskope’s newest round is Iconiq Capital, the firm run by the man Forbes dubbed “the spider of Silicon Valley.” The man behind the not-so-flattering moniker is Divesh Makan, and his powerhouse investment fund manages money for some of the Valley’s biggest names, including a clutch of Facebook senior executives, and executives and founders of companies like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Additional financing for Netskope came from previous investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Social + Capital Partnership. According to a press release the money from the found will be used for what you would expect it to be used for: developing new products, expanding sales and marketing and blah-blah-blah.

If Netskope has raised a big round, we can probably expect to see new funding come through for other participants in the market, like Skyhigh Networks, which raised $66 million from Sequoia Capital and Greylock to roll out its cloud application monitoring and management services; or from FireLayers, which launched from stealth last year with its own take on cloud application provisioning, management and security.

As I wrote last year, the guiding principle for Netskope’s service is that IT departments can wrest back control over how their colleagues use technology with more of a velvet glove than an iron fist — or as Accel investor and Netskope board member, Eric Wolford, puts it, “[IT departments] need a sharpshooter and they use a bazooka.”

Using Netskope’s services, the company claims that its customers no longer have to have an “on-or-off” approach to application management on mobile devices. Employees can use whatever services they want to, while Netskope’s technology monitors and manages the data that’s being transmitted to and from the cloud applications. IT managers can set up rules that determine the types of data that can and can’t be sent to cloud-based services.