RSAC 2026 Conference | Nimmy Reichenberg, Cato Networks

Clips
More from RSAC 2026 Conference

Nimmy Reichenberg

SVP, Product Marketing

Cato Networks

play_circle_outline Cato surpassed $350M ARR in 2025, 43% growth.

play_circle_outline SASE unified platform converging network and security for operational simplicity and economic benefits.

play_circle_outline Cato Neural Edge: GPU-Powered SASE in 85 PoPs for Local AI Compute, Inspection and AI Security

play_circle_outline Owning Cloud Infrastructure and Single-Pass Inspection: Resilient, Economical, High-Performance, GPU-Independent Cloud Security

play_circle_outline Cato Integrates Aim Security in Six Months, Doubling Down on AI Security and Customer Growth

Info
Transcript

Nimmy Reichenberg, Cato Networks

Nimmy Reichenberg

SVP, Product Marketing Cato Networks

In this interview from RSAC 2026, Nimmy Reichenberg, senior vice president of product marketing at Cato Networks, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Christophe Bertrand to discuss the launch of the first AI-native SASE platform and how unified infrastructure is redefining network security for the agentic AI era. Reichenberg opens with a strong business update: Cato surpassed $350 million in ARR and grew 43% in 2025, nearly doubling the broader SASE category's 26% growth rate. He details two major RSAC announcements — Cato Neural Edge, which deploys NVIDIA GPUs... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

There are two questions in the excerpt. In neutral form: - What has happened in the past year? Please provide a business update (growth, ARR, and how you compare to category growth). - What is the premise behind rethinking the network and network security, and can you give an overview of the unified solution you built? add

How did Cato Networks come to invent and pioneer the SASE category, and what benefits does converging networking and security into a single platform provide? add

What does it mean to be the first AI-native SASE platform, and how do the recent announcements (AI security features and the Neural Edge with NVIDIA GPUs in 85 PoPs) secure AI interactions and improve performance and threat detection? add

1) Does bringing GPUs into the company’s cloud affect pricing for customers? 2) Is optimizing the company’s own cloud with GPUs the fundamental competitive differentiation, and will that be an investment the company accelerates going forward or something that will shift toward optimization over time? add

1) Where does the company aim to be one year from now, how is success defined, and what key milestones should observers watch? 2) As head of product marketing, how should acquisitions be evaluated and integrated so they fit into the platform and the company’s marketing architecture? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Nimmy Reichenberg, Cato Networks

search

Dave Vellante

>> We're back at Moscone West on the ground floor. Stop by and see us. This is day three of theCUBE's live coverage, RSAC 2026. I'm Dave Vellante with Christophe Bertrand, my co-host. John Olsick is out doing his reporter's notebook, getting all the scoop. And Nimmy Reichenberg is here, as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Cato Networks, a CUBE company, been on a number of times. You guys won theCUBEd Awards last year, last March, I think. So congratulations on that.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> And thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dave Vellante

>> So you guys have been growing quite nicely. I want to say last time Shlomo was on, your CEO was February of 2025. We had an NYSE CUBE event. And I think you were at 250 million ARR at the time. What's happened in the last year? Give us the business update.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah, we actually published some results for 2025. We surpassed 350 million in ARR, grew 43%. And when you consider the fact that the SASE category is growing at 26% year over year, we're really outpacing the category growth, so we couldn't be happier with our results.

Dave Vellante

>> And give us the premise. You've kind of rethought the network and network security and built that into a unified system. Give us the overview of that, if you would.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Sure. So Cato really invented and pioneered the SASE category. The company was founded on the belief that when you converge network and security and move from a situation where you have fragmented products, fragmented appliances, each doing its own thing, and you're able to converge it into one unified solution with a single policy engine and a single platform, a single architecture, you get quite a few things. The first thing, you get operational simplicity, you get rid of all that complexity. And the second thing, you can get economical benefits. The thing is easier to deploy, easier to maintain, and it's easier to adapt. And if you've been around RSA, you may have noticed AI and AI security. Companies have to adapt all the time. And I think every time something new happens, the Cato platform, it's so easy to make changes. And we say, it's so easy to be ready for what's next.

Dave Vellante

>> All right, so let's get into some of the hard news that you guys have made this week. There's two major announcements and innovations. First, it's called the Cato Neural Edge, which is a GPU powered SASE platform. And I think you've got a relationship with NVIDIA, good choice. And then Cato AI Security. So it's a SASE platform that's specifically built for AI. And I think you guys are saying it's the first. Take us through those.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Sure. So when you combine those two announcements, really what you get is the first AI native SASE platform. And if we unpack that, maybe let's start with AI security. And interesting enough, when you say AI security, you're really referring to two things. One is securing the usage of AI itself. And the second is using AI as a security professional as a defender to better defend against cyber threats. So if you look at the first part, which is securing AI interactions, securing AI interaction is now native on the SASE platform. What that means is that we're able to offer security for AI that you use, that your employees use, things like ChatGPT or Cursor or whatever tool they use to enhance their productivity, for the AI-powered applications that companies are building themselves, think of something like an AI-powered customer support chatbot and for agents. So we're able to secure and govern all those interactions on the same unified SASE platform, same architecture, same policy, same engine, same console. So when companies want to advance to a secure AI interaction that's all natural and it all works the same way that they used to. What we're doing with the Neural Edge is we've added NVIDIA GPUs in all our points of presence. We have points of presence pops in 85 locations around the world. And what that enables us to do is process AI and AI interactions, AI inspection, close to where those AI interactions are happening. So we need to inspect AI interactions, but we also need GPUs to be able to leverage AI inside the Cato platform to do things like better threat detection, better threat correlation using AI. So really what that gives our customers is, first and foremost, performance, because the AI compute happens close to where the users are and where the AI interactions take place. And it also gives us improved security because we're able to share context, not just AI, but with all the other telemetry and all the other contexts that we as a network and security vendor are able to collect.

Dave Vellante

>> Great. Awesome setup. Christophe?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. So Nimmy, I have a couple of questions on this. I'm very interested by the GPU conversation. First of all, does that have a consequence on pricing for your services, for your offerings? Because obviously GPUs are not cheap, as we know. That's number one. And number two, or is it actually an operational efficiency advantage, not only for performance you mentioned for your clients, but also for yourselves where you can actually now provide maybe more with essentially a more powerful sort of architecture. So I'm very curious about that because GPU is expensive.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yes. So I think part of our mission is to simplify network and security for our customers and really just move everything up to the cloud so they don't have to worry about this. So the answer to your first question is absolutely not. This does not impact pricing to our customers. As far as we're concerned, if you want to do AI security, you have to use GPUs one way or the other. So what other companies may be forced to do is use GPUs on cloud providers, infrastructure, and you have to use it one way or another. So we've always believed that by owning our own cloud, we can provide a very resilient service to our customers and we're just bringing GPUs to our own cloud as opposed to using somebody else's GPUs.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So is that really fundamentally the differentiation? You're really essentially optimizing your own cloud with GPUs, giving you that extra advantage over your competition. And is that something you see as an investment that's going to be accelerated in the future? Or do you see an optimization happening over time? You can't keep buying GPUs forever, right?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah, so I'll say a few things. First of all, the advantage is Cato's always had what we call space or a single pass cloud engine, which means that all the inspection happens in one place in one pass. So unlike appliance space or other solutions that have to inspect internet traffic in one place, and then as you inspect things for different security, threats are actually moving to separate environments and oftentimes even separate hardware, separate boxes. So the advantage to us is this whole seamless single pass inspection now extends to AI with the GPUs. So again, everything's faster, more streamlined, and easier to manage. In terms of investment, I mean, we're always investing, you would argue that bandwidth consumption increases and compute increases, we'll make whatever investments are needed to make sure that customers can have a secure, modern network and network security that addresses the latest environment and the latest threats.

Dave Vellante

>> Is it fair to think of you as an AI security cloud?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Absolutely. And again, and when we say AI security, it's both sides of the coin, it's securing the AI interactions themselves, but it's also using AI to provide better security.

Dave Vellante

>> And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's novel that you're actually essentially building your own infrastructure, right?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Absolutely That's been the Cato philosophy and differentiator from day one. And one of the things that we've always said, "Hey, it's so much easier to add stuff when you are in control of your own destiny." And I think the AI transformation is great proof of that. So we talked about our announcements. In less than six months of acquiring Aim Security, it is now fully integrated into the Cato platform. That could only be done because we have a single architecture across all our capabilities.

Dave Vellante

>> So that's the benefit that you get as a competitive differentiator. What's the benefit to your customers of offering that sort of native AI security capability in SASE?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Right. So think about single policy. So if you need to apply a policy to all AI interactions, we need to define a policy that applies to AI in other areas of network security one place, a single console. You don't have to manage three or four different consoles and some other solutions. One to secure agentic AI, one for shadow AI discovery, and of course, one for your legacy network security. So it's operational simplicity and better security because Cato has a single data lake where all the telemetry feeds in. Now the AI telemetry feeds into that same data lake. So again, you don't have a fragmented visibility problem or, how do I piece together everything to get the complete picture? So it's operational simplicity and improved security.

Dave Vellante

>> So I mean, from a first principle standpoint, you guys decided early on that you were going to essentially own your own infrastructure, you were going to bite the bullet on the CapEx requirements and then deliver better economics presumably to your customers, but you had to pay the price upfront, but that was a really important decision that you made. And then now as you grow and you're scaling, you get the payoff.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yes. And I haven't been in Cato since the early days, but Shlomo's vision back in the early days, a lot of people thought it was crazy and here we are 10 years later and Shlomo did it again and his vision proved to be the right one.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Quick question. I think you have about 4,000, 5,000 customers at this point?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yes.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So that's significant. I imagine mostly enterprise, maybe some mid-market. It's starting to change. We're hearing a lot of segment changes with AI. Curious about some of your relationships with different programs and certifications like FedRAMP, for example. I know it's something you guys have been working on. How's that changing your business, because that's pretty significant.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah, so obviously we keep expanding if it's things like FedRAMP and Federal. We did announce that we have started the FedRAMP certification process not that long ago, moving up market to more enterprise customers, winning not just with AI security, but AI security is certainly very helpful to win your customers because it's probably top of mind for every organization today. So we're continuing to expand. I mean, the relationship with our customers, we have very close to zero churn. I think once customers experience what a true platform is like, you're never going back. So I think we always strive to be that partner, close partner to customers and the data proves that customers really love Cato and very rarely will they leave.

Dave Vellante

>> People talk about the token economy, tokenomics. How are you taking advantage of intelligence? How are you applying that intelligence, and obviously in the form of tokens, what does that mean for how you price and how your customers consume?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Right, so we haven't made any announcements when it comes to token-based pricing. It's not something that I can talk to, but on the subject of pricing, we have made changes to pricing that allows customers to be more modular in how they consume the platforms because as beautiful and unified as a platform is, we realize not every company can make this transformation in one swoop. So there are constant questions that we get for customers, "What if I have bursts in traffic or what if I need to add users over time?" So those are things that we have addressed in our pricing. We haven't made any public changes or announcements when it comes to token based pricing.

Dave Vellante

>> Sure, but you are using tokens, right? I mean, that's part of your system and you're hiding that essentially smartly from the customers because you don't want it to be like mobile phone gigabytes. It just doesn't make any sense. So your customer sees value. It's really, I guess, value-based pricing because it's a consumption model. Is that-

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah. So I mean, when today the units of measurement are either users or bandwidth, right? So bandwidth is obviously consumption based to an extent and users grow with the company. And I think with, again, who knows what the future will hold, but I think one of the things that enterprise customers really value is predictability. One of the things that I think are sometimes problematic with token-based pricing, is budgeting for it, how many tokens I'm going to use if I need to set budget for the year? So I think the industry will come to terms with that and find solutions for that. But for now, I think the fact that our pricing is predictable is a big advantage.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, I think so too. The reason I'm pushing on this is because Shlomo's vision, if you're some other company, you have to pay the cloud cogs and you got to pay tokens. Everybody's going to pay tokens. You want to consume tokens because that's how you consume intelligence, but you have an advantage because you don't have to absorb as much cloud cogs, so you have a cost advantage that presumably can benefit your customers.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Exactly. Like you said, the fact that we own our own cloud, there's economical benefits and higher margins there. So again, we haven't publicized any information I think recently on gross margins, but our margins are as healthy as ever. We don't really see an impact from tokenization. At this point, that may change in the future, but that's where we are now.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So actually my follow-up question on that is technology related, but maybe pricing related in time is, what about agentic AI? Is that going to change something? Is it going to change nothing? What do you expect?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah. So with agentic AI, that is probably the number one issue we hear from customers. And again, in many ways, SASE was, maybe without knowing it, kind of built to address agenda AI because really what SASE does is secure access and connectivity of, originally maybe it was conceived to do that for human employees, but now you've got agents. Agents are going to, of course, outnumber human employees in the very near future. And a lot of the zero trust and SASE principles apply to agents, right? I need to know what are they accessing? How are they accessing? Make sure that they're accessing things securely. And with our AI security capabilities, we've added things that are only specific to agents. For example, what tools are they using? How do I protect them from threats that are specific to Agentic AI such as prompt injections? So we're filling in the additional requirements to secure Agentic AI and a lot of the traditional SASE capabilities carry over very well into the Agentic environment.

Dave Vellante

>> You mentioned the platform word. And I remember when John was interviewing Shlomo a year ago, he talked about, he used the example of Cisco cobbling together a bunch of companies. We had Jeetu Patel on, and of course he had to sort of rethink that whole thing. But so at any rate, platform allows you certain advantages. How do you think about platform? What benefits does that give you in terms of being able to add new functions? Even if it's through M&A, and you can bring them into the platform, what does that mean for your customers?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Right. So I wish I could say things changed from the last conversation with Shlomo where a lot of times when, in the industry, people say platforms, what they really mean is portfolio of products that are loosely connected and loosely integrated.

Dave Vellante

>> With a veneer, that's-

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yes. So I wish I could say there is less duct tape in the industry, so to speak. But as far as Cato, like I said, we were designed from day one as a true platform. And like I said, there's economic benefits to our customers, it ultimately translates to economical benefits. We deploy in days, as opposed to months with hefty professional services fees. We've heard customers that they needed 20 people to operationalize network and security, and that's down to two, for example, because we take all that complexity away and we handle it on behalf of our customers. And when it comes to needing to change, you're a customer, you acquire another company, you now have to security again, that complexity has been greatly reduced. So all of that translates to the bottom line from an economic standpoint. And as I mentioned, from a security standpoint, it is so much easier when you have one policy in one place, where you have visibility of everything in one place. So there's both economical benefits and security benefits to the platform. That's ultimately what brings customers to Cato and what causes them, like I said, to stay. Once you see what a true platform is, it's very hard to give that up.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, the industry duct tape is actually a gift to you guys. So in many ways you're probably happy that you're unhappy to be able to see that. All right, so let's say here you are today, RSAC 2026, where do you want to be a year from now? How do you define success? What are your key milestones that observers like us should be watching?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah, so obviously we continue to have aggressive growth targets as a company. We definitely plan on continuing to outpace their category growth. AI security, we're just getting started, right? Cato made its first acquisition about six months ago. There's so much to do around AI security. It's a big growth engine. You add that to the fact that we're continuing to go after new segments. I think this year you will see us investing heavily in AI security and investing heavily in growth in our existing customer base and in new segments.

Dave Vellante

>> When you do M&A, obviously because you're a platform company, you have to think you're not going to just bolt it on, it has to fit into the platform, it has to fit into your marketing architecture. As the head of product marketing, how do you think about that?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah, I think that ultimately the proof is in the pudding, right? I mean, everybody can say we're going to integrate, it's going to be unified, it's going to be seamless. Here we are less than six months after the acquisition of Aim Security. And if you look at the Cato management console and you look at the AI security tab, you would never guess that this was an acquisition. So I think it's ultimately, you can't just talk the talk, you got to walk the walk. And we certainly did that with our first acquisition.

Dave Vellante

>> So how's the show going for you guys? I know you're having a lot of deep customer meetings. What's the conversation like?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Would you believe what the number one topic is, AI security and specifically Agentic AI. But interestingly enough, a lot of times we talk to customers and AI security is top of mind, but once they get to know Cato and they understand the power of the platform, they're often in a position to say, "Okay, wow, I really like this. What else can you do?" So AI security is often a motion with a potential to expand from there. So I've talked to quite a few customers over the last few days. AI security is top of mind for everybody, but network and security, complexity, fragmentation, it's still there. And that is still a problem that a lot of customers need to solve.

Dave Vellante

>> Are you finding that customers are having to sort of rob Peter to pay the AI Paul or security, do you feel like still somewhat insulated from that shift?

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Yeah. No, so I have found that budget for AI security in my experience is not a big challenge for a couple of reasons. Number one, companies are investing in AI and since security and governance is the number one hurdle to AI adoption, a company is like, "Okay, if I'm going to invest X amount of dollars in AI, I want to carve out 10%, 15%, whatever that number is for the company to make sure it's secure and governed." So in that sense, the security team gets an added budget to secure AI as part of the AI budget. Number two, we know AI transformation is top of mind for every organization. So when the board of directors tell the CEO, "I need you to show me how are you using AI to stay competitive?" And when that CEO turns to the CISO and says, "Okay, show me how you secure this," and they all have to report back in the next board meeting, they find the budget. Magical things happen.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, that's interesting because as you point out, a lot of times it's a rubber stamp item. We got to have security, so we got to uplift it. It's kind of like payroll taxes, fully loaded costs, right? Very cool.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> By the way, on that note, a lot of customers are asking, are coming to us for expertise saying, "Hey, our AI budget is X, how much should we carve out for security?" So the companies are still figuring it out, but they will get the budget to secure and govern AI.

Dave Vellante

>> You guys are growing fast, you're strategic in the sense, especially in this hybrid multi-cloud world, you can kind of be the connection point for all these different clouds and all these different sort of estates. They can come through you to sort of be safe and that's kind of what your play is.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> I think it's part of what we are. I think it's part of what every partner wants to be a trusted advisor to their customers and absolutely. And I think we acquired a lot of AI expertise through the Aim acquisition, coupled with the expertise at Cato. So absolutely we're there to help our customers secure their AI transformation. And it's a journey. A lot of people ask me, "Well, what's your three-year vision? What's coming in AI two years from now?" And my answer's always the same. A year ago, nobody asked us to secure MCP servers because they didn't exist. Nobody asked us to secure agentic browsers because it didn't exist. Everything is moving so fast, the only thing we can really do is that we've got the expertise, we're committed to making the investments and I'm not betting against the fact that the hottest thing in AI security 12 or 18 months from now is something that none of us have heard of.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. When you hear about OpenClaw, it just came on the scene. It's the hottest open source project ever.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Exactly, right.

Dave Vellante

>> Nimmy, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you-

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> My pleasure thanks for having me....

Dave Vellante

>> sharing the Cato story.

Nimmy Reichenberg

>> Thank you very much.

Dave Vellante

>> You're welcome. All right keep it right here. This Dave Vellante for Christophe Bertrand, RSAC 2026. You're watching theCUBE.