Protecting the Digital World Around Us: SentinelOne IPO

When we invest in an early-stage company, we don’t think about its eventual IPO. Instead, we focus on how the startup uses Deep Tech to solve a difficult, important problem. We partner with companies to help them reach their goals, celebrating every milestone along the way. Exits occur in due time for companies built on solid foundations that are reshaping the future for the better.

Today, SentinelOne (NYSE:S) became the seventh DCVC company to debut on the public markets since December 2020, joining AbCellera (Nasdaq: ABCL), Recursion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (Nasdaq: RXRX), Zymergen (Nasdaq: ZY), Confluent (Nasdaq: CFLT), Desktop Metal (NYSE: DM) and Lucira Health (Nasdaq: LHDX). Three more companies are joining the list through deSPAC trans­ac­tions currently in progress (Rocket Lab, Evolv Technology and Embark Trucks).

For DCVC, these exits signify something more than a healthy return on investment for our Limited Partners. They are a validation of Deep Tech’s underlying thesis: that computing in combination with new science or technology can reduce the capital and operational costs needed to attack previously intractable problems in nearly any industry. We help companies do the impossible on a budget.

We led SentinelOne’s Seed in 2013 and partic­i­pated in every round through the Series E, because the company was an exemplar of our Deep Tech thesis. Its algo­rithimic advantage is break­through AI for blocking nation-state level cyber­at­tacks. The company substitutes autonomous detection, inves­ti­ga­tion and response for the arrays of global equipment and over-worked, error-prone human experts that cyber­se­cu­rity rivals deploy behind the scenes. SentinelOne’s tech­no­log­ical superiority is real: it stopped the cata­strophic SolarWinds hack, even as rivals’ customers were compromised.

SentinelOne’s NYSE IPO was successful because a relentless team demon­strated they could keep law-abiding nations and orga­ni­za­tions like hospitals and military instal­la­tions safe from cyber warfare by bad actors. Going beyond spam filters and phishing alerts, SentinelOne’s systems contin­u­ously and proactively secure and remediate advanced threats. In contrast to much cyber­se­cu­rity hype, SentinelOne has shown that its AI truly learns and adapts to the constantly changing threats facing the global economy, whether they are ransomware attacks designed to cripple our critical utilities or malicious attempts at undermining election security.

By combining novel computer science approaches and engineering break­throughs, SentinelOne has reshaped what its customers expect from cyber­se­cu­rity, and protected the lawful world’s insti­tu­tions and organizations.

Today, we celebrate yet another DCVC company making its public market debut. The smiles behind the Nasdaq podium are indicative of the hard work and dedication that built SentinelOne into an autonomous security pioneer. Today is also a celebration of our belief in a company that has the power to change the world. We’re also looking forward to what’s to come, both for SentinelOne as a public company and the other DCVC Deep Tech companies helping ​“cancel the apocalypse.”

Congrat­u­la­tions to the SentinelOne team on today’s IPO!