SentinelOne CEO: Customers Want A Prevention-First Approach

‘They‘re feeling more and more frustrated by this need to constantly put out fires. And if you take a more prevention-first approach, you can actually stop these fires from even happening,’ says SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten.

SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten said customers are frustrated with the number of infections that get through endpoint security offerings focused more on detection and response.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based endpoint security company won over a Fortune 500 company looking for a platform that can both remediate and clean up infections as well as prevent them in the first place, Weingarten said. The multimillion-dollar customer was frustrated with the number of infections, lack of automation and subpar protection for server environments from their existing endpoint security tool.

“For a lot of these customers, they‘re feeling more and more frustrated by this need to constantly put out fires,” Weingarten told investors Wednesday during SentinelOne’s first-ever earnings call. “And if you take a more prevention-first approach, you can actually stop these fires from even happening.”

[Related: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz Takes Big Swings At Microsoft, SentinelOne]

Weingarten said SentinelOne’s next-generation endpoint security competitors are focused on bundling services with detection and response technology. SentinelOne, though, takes a more holistic approach to securing the endpoint that includes everything from prevention and OS protection to hardening and anti-tampering to automation and efficacy, according to company executives.

Weingarten and COO Nicholas Warner also pushed back on claims that SentinelOne is cheaper than the competition, asserting that the company’s technology costs as much or more than competing products. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz had accused SentinelOne of “buying growth” to impress investors, telling CRN in July, “At some point, you’ve got to reverse the losses and start generating cash.”

“From a budget perspective, what we don‘t try to do is hijack a customer’s security budget by forcing them to buy reams of services hours to support a non-automated product,” Warner told investors Wednesday. “What we’re bringing is automation and machine learning and ease of use. And really, we’re democratizing very advanced technology.”

SentinelOne’s sales for the quarter ended July 31 skyrocketed to $45.8 million, up 121.3 percent from $20.7 million a year earlier. That beat analyst earnings projections of $40.3 million, according to Seeking Alpha.

Net loss worsened to $68.2 million, or $0.57 per diluted share, 197.2 percent greater than a net loss of $22.9 million, or $0.67 per diluted share, a year earlier. On a non-GAAP basis, net loss increased to $46 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, 115.5 percent worse than a net loss of $21.4 million, or $0.62 per diluted share, last year. That missed non-GAAP loss estimates of $0.20 per share, Seeking Alpha said.

SentinelOne’s stock fell $0.74 (1.08 percent) to $67.50 in after-hours trading. Earnings were announced after the market closed Wednesday. SentinelOne burst into the public market at the end of June with the biggest cybersecurity initial public offering of all time, raising $1.2 billion on a record-breaking $10 billion valuation. Over the past 70 days, SentinelOne’s market cap has jumped up to $18.58 billion.

In the quarter ended Oct. 31, SentinelOne expects revenue of between $49 million and $50 million. That crushed analyst sales expectations for the quarter of $40.4 million, according to Seeking Alpha.