Infra Play #86: Purple rain
Deep dive into SentinelOne and their struggle for a place under the (cyber) sun
In my recent deep dive for Fortinet, I concluded the following:
Fortinet is a good opportunity for starter roles in cybersecurity or as a co-selling partner if you work for an MSP/SI. Unless you’ll work Enterprise/Strat in the US, I would not recommend joining as an A player. In theory they have all of the ingredients of a platform play, but the actual product adoption raises significant questions around that story.
In this edition of the newsletter, we will be diving into SentinelOne. The company likes to position itself as the superior option to CrowdStrike, arguably speaking the most successful pure-play cybersecurity vendor in the last 5 years. Whether that is actually true or they are closer to being another Fortinet, is something that we will try to answer based on the available evidence.
The key takeaway
For tech sales: While the company might appear alluring at first glance (strong AI play, big incumbents to displace, generous compensation), the reality is that SentinelOne is entering a very difficult period and the go-to-market teams will bear the brunt of both the pressure and the cuts. This is an opportunity for individuals with an appetite for risk.
For investors: SentinelOne has underperformed on the stock market for so long that it’s difficult to make any attempts at positioning the company as a “value pick” without seeing either higher sustained performance or more meaningful changes on the leadership side.
Purple AI and other curiosities
Source: SentinelOne.com
Tomer Weingarten: We successfully transformed our business from an endpoint focused model to a comprehensive leading AI native cybersecurity platform. At the same time, we accelerated our time to profitability through focused investments and discipline. We achieved significant profitability milestones, including our first quarter of positive operating income in Q4, well ahead of our expectations, our first full year of positive net income and earnings per share and our first full year of positive free cash flow. With these results, we’ve crossed a key inflection point, and we believe the company is well positioned for sustained growth and profitability at scale.
We expect to surpass $1 billion in both ARR and revenue this year, an important milestone in our growth journey. We also expect to achieve full year operating income profitability, while continuing to invest in our platform and future opportunities. In fiscal year ‘26, we remain focused on execution and advancing Singularity is the preeminent AI-powered cybersecurity platform for the future, which brings me to the state of the market. In many ways, the cybersecurity status quo was a disappointment in 2024, more breaches, more cost and more data was stolen than ever before, personal data, financial data, healthcare data and the list goes on.
Our entire world is now digital, and these breaches are challenging that very basic fabric. Furthermore, AI is no longer experimental and in the hands of attackers, it’s a real threat. The scale, automation and speed of attacks are accelerating. Looking ahead, we must redefine the security landscape with a modern approach, our industry cannot afford torely on the same outdated approaches over the past two decades.
SentinelOne’s journey over the last year has been focused on increasing profitability while deploying more features geared towards utilizing GenAI on top of their stack in order to facilitate a better experience for its users. Now the stack itself is a rather well-rated platform, hidden behind one of the most try-hard marketing in the industry:
Source: SentinelOne FY25 Investor Presentation
Tomer Weingarten: We can leap, not just take steps forward. And this year, we’re leaping forward to where the future is going to be. We have an incredible opportunity ahead to collaborate with our customers, partners and enterprises worldwide to usher in the new era of cybersecurity with Singularity. Our success stems from our focused innovation strategy and technology leadership. Let me cover that in more detail. Three things set our Singularity platform apart.
One, unified defenses, the only open unified AI security platform, integrating data, endpoint, cloud identity and third-party solutions for broad and complete coverage and protection.
Two, outpace threats. Autonomous security and industry leading signal to noise ratio delivers real-time protection and actionable insights to stay ahead of threats.
And three, enhanced security analysts. Our generative and agentic AI set the standard in defending against modern threats designed to evolve and constantly adapt Singularity helps move faster, more efficiently and save cost.
There is a lot to uncover here.