Cato Networks vs Modal
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Tel Aviv SASE pioneer (founded 2015, Check Point co-founder) at $300M+ ARR (Sep 2025) and $4.8B valuation (Series G Jun 2025); first acquisition Aim Security AI Sep 2025 competing with Palo Alto Prisma SASE and Zscaler.
About
Cato Networks is a Tel Aviv, Israel-based SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) network security company — having raised over $1 billion in total funding including a Series G round in June 2025 at a $4.8 billion valuation — providing enterprises with a converged SD-WAN, network security (firewall, CASB, DLP, ZTNA), and XDR platform delivered as a cloud-native service from a global Points of Presence (PoPs) network. Founded in 2015 by CEO Shlomo Kramer (co-founder of Check Point Software, pioneer of the commercial firewall in 1993, and founder of Imperva in 2002) and President Gur Shatz (co-founder of Incapsula, cloud web application security), the company defined the SASE category before Gartner formally named it in 2019. Cato surpassed $250 million in ARR in 2024 (+46% year-over-year growth) and reached $300+ million ARR by September 2025, serving 3,500+ enterprises across 190 countries with 50,000 connected sites and 1.5 million remote users protected by zero trust network access (ZTNA). In September 2025, Cato completed its first acquisition — Aim Security — to expand AI security capabilities for enterprise AI agent adoption.
Serverless GPU cloud platform for AI/ML with Python-native deployment and per-second billing; developer-favorite scaling from zero competing with Replicate and Beam for AI compute.
About
Modal is a serverless cloud computing platform purpose-built for AI and machine learning workloads — providing on-demand GPU compute that scales instantly from zero with per-second billing, container management, distributed training support, and a Python-native developer experience that makes running ML workloads in the cloud feel as simple as running code locally. Founded in 2021 in New York City and backed by Redpoint Ventures and other investors, Modal has grown rapidly as AI development has accelerated demand for flexible, developer-friendly GPU infrastructure.\n\nModal's developer experience is its primary differentiator — engineers write Python functions decorated with @modal.function() and deploy them to the cloud with a single command, with Modal handling container building, GPU provisioning, auto-scaling, and execution. The platform supports training jobs that need distributed compute across multiple GPUs, model serving endpoints that scale to zero when unused (eliminating idle GPU costs), and batch inference jobs that process large datasets. The per-second billing model means developers pay only for actual compute time, not provisioned instances.\n\nIn 2025, Modal competes in the AI infrastructure market with Replicate, Beam, Banana, and major cloud providers' managed ML services (AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Azure ML) for serverless GPU compute. The market for AI-specific cloud infrastructure has grown dramatically as the number of ML engineers deploying models to production has expanded — traditional cloud providers require significant DevOps expertise to use GPU instances effectively, while Modal's Python-native approach reduces the barrier to entry. Modal has attracted a strong developer following among AI researchers and ML engineers building production AI applications. The 2025 strategy focuses on growing the developer community, adding enterprise features (dedicated GPU capacity, private networking, compliance), and expanding the hardware options available (H100 GPUs, custom accelerators).
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