Shares in cybersecurity firm Netskope climbed on Monday amid a flurry of positive ratings launched by Wall Street analysts. Netskope stock had cooled off since its initial public offering.
At least a dozen Wall Street firms launched initiations of Netskope stock with buy, outperform or overweight ratings.
On the stock market today, Netskope stock rose more than 5% to 22.98 in morning trading. As of Friday's market close, shares in the cybersecurity firm were up about 3% since the IPO on Sept. 18. Shares hit a high of 27.99 on Sept. 22 then pulled back.
William Blair analyst Jonathan Ho initiated coverage with an outperform rating
"Legacy products, such as firewalls and VPNs, are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of hybrid remote workers, shadow AI, data security, and zero trust initiatives," Ho said in a report. "Netskope's platform solution allows customers to have a more secure, better-performing, data-centric, and modernized network security capability."
Netskope Stock: SASE Share Gainer
Netskope operates a cloud-based Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, platform that supports remote workers and branch offices. Founded in 2012, Netskope competes against Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler and many others.
At BMO Capital Markets, analyst Keith Bachman started coverage on Netskope with an outperform rating. "We believe that Netskope offers a leading SASE platform that provides effective visibility, contextual awareness, security, and control over customers' traffic," he said in a report.
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In the Netskope IPO, the cybersecurity firm raised over $900 million with a valuation of $7.3 billion.
JPMorgan analyst Brian Essex said in a report: "In addition to greenfield and market expansion momentum, Netskope is benefiting from share shift at the expense of legacy security and networking vendors that have not been able to innovate to keep up with the pace of change."
According to a Netskope regulatory filing, the company's revenue increased 31% year over year to $328 million for the six months ended July 31. It had a net loss of $170 million, improving from a $207 million loss a year earlier.
Netskope has focused on the financial services, health care and federal government markets.
IBD's group of cybersecurity stocks ranks No. 97 out of 197 groups tracked. Top performers in the cybersecurity group this year include Cloudflare, Zscaler, and CrowdStrike Holdings.
Follow Reinhardt Krause on X, formerly Twitter, @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
