A Primer on Sentinel One

Handy overview of the products and business model

Stay tuned for our Quick Take on SentinelOne, discussing the financials and outlook.

Overview

SentinelOne is a cybersecurity company that has pioneered the world's first purpose-built AI-powered Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to make cybersecurity defense truly autonomous. The company aims to address a generational shift in cybersecurity, driven by enterprise digital transformation and the rise of AI, by enabling organizations to stay ahead of attackers and respond in real-time at machine speed.

Industry Background and Challenges

Cybersecurity is fundamentally a data problem. Organizations face:

• Sensitive customer and business data are growing, making organizations and governments targets for highly sophisticated cybercriminals who use large, distributed networks of attackers.

• The shift to remote/hybrid work, rapid cloud adoption, complex operating system landscapes, and the proliferation of connected (including IoT and unmanaged) devices have expanded the attack surface beyond traditional perimeter-based security, necessitating a "Zero Trust" operating procedure. Endpoints and cloud workloads are now the epicenter of defense.

• Modern attacks are fast-acting, capable of breaching organizations and disrupting operations within seconds, and can also be stealthy, operating undetected for long periods. Threat actors are increasingly using generative AI to boost the sophistication, frequency, and speed of attacks.

• Despite the exponential increase in devices, applications, and threats, there is an acute shortage of skilled cybersecurity talent. Existing security solutions often generate overwhelming volumes of alerts that security teams struggle to analyze.

Limitations of Legacy Solutions

Traditional security tools struggle to cope with the modern threat landscape, leading to a rising number of successful attacks. Key limitations include:

• Legacy tools like signature-based approaches, human-powered monitoring, application whitelisting, and sandboxing are effective only in limited circumstances and cannot detect the full spectrum of modern threats, including unknown malware, ransomware, fileless attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities.

• First-generation AI tools cannot handle the volume, variety, and velocity of real-time data needed for effective breach prevention. They often rely on ineffective pattern-matching, generating "noise" that requires human intervention and cannot act at machine speed to stop fast-acting attacks due to cloud communication latency.

• Many existing detection and response tools lack cost-efficient historical data storage, offering only limited data retention, which hinders full incident investigation and proactive threat hunting.

• Legacy tools were not designed for today’s multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-operating system environments. They often have inconsistent capabilities across different platforms and struggle to identify and protect unmanaged IoT devices.

• On-premise tools are complex and difficult to adapt, while cloud-only vendors may not meet the security, regulatory, and compliance needs of large enterprises and governments requiring private or hybrid cloud solutions.

• Many legacy tools lack out-of-the-box APIs and rely on expensive professional services, limiting automation and efficient security processes.

SentinelOne's Singularity Platform

SentinelOne's AI-powered Singularity Platform delivers enterprise-wide security across diverse attack vectors through a single, unified data and security architecture. It is designed to autonomously prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks.

Key Technologies and Capabilities

• Data Ingestion and Contextualization: The platform ingests, correlates, and queries petabytes of structured and unstructured data from various internal and external sources in real-time, building rich context and a dynamic representation of an organization's data.

• Distributed AI Models: Highly optimized AI models (Static AI, Behavioral AI, Streaming AI) run both locally on every endpoint and cloud workload, and on the cloud platform.

  • Static AI: Predicts file-based attacks, including previously unknown "zero-day" attacks, with extreme precision in milliseconds.

  • Behavioral AI: Models, maps, monitors, and links all behaviors to create "Storylines," which are continuously evaluated for best-in-class detection. It is attack vector agnostic.

  • Streaming AI: Detects anomalies when multiple data feeds are correlated with additional external and internal data.

• Storyline Technology: Builds a real-time model of running processes and their behaviors, creating rich, contextual data narratives that serve as input for Behavioral AI. This provides unprecedented visibility and context for both benign and malicious processes. When deemed a threat, the software autonomously takes action to stop the attack.

• Autonomous Remediation and Rollback: The software can autonomously stop attacks and remediate or roll back unauthorized changes with a single click, effectively turning back time on a device. This eliminates manual, expensive, and time-consuming incident cleanup, acting as the "ultimate safety net".

• Comprehensive Visibility: Provides visibility across an organization’s digital assets (endpoints, cloud workloads, identity credentials, unmanaged devices, IoT devices) through a fully-integrated console, enabling security teams to search petabytes of data to investigate incidents and hunt threats.

• Generative AI (Purple AI): SentinelOne’s flagship agentic AI solution uses advanced neural networks and security-specific models trained on trillions of data points. It replicates the analytical thought processes of expert security analysts, enabling rapid, intelligent triage, investigation, and response to threats. It allows security teams to quickly identify and respond to threats through natural language queries and automated investigation workflows. Purple AI automates threat hunting, detection, triage, investigation, and remediation. It generates novel detection rules and orchestrates multi-step response actions, transforming insights into autonomous workflows.

• Singularity Data Lake (SDL): A proprietary, fully integrated security data lake that fuses data, access, control, and integration from EPP, EDR, CWS, Identity Protection, and IoT security into a centralized platform, optimized for scale, cost, and performance.

  • Functions: Ingests structured/unstructured data, normalizes data to extract shared elements, correlates events into Storylines, and enriches/visualizes Storylines with threat intelligence.

• Flexible Deployment and Multi-Tenancy: Can be deployed on public, private, or hybrid clouds. Offers true multi-tenancy with four tiers (Global, Account, Site, Group) and customizable Role Based Access Control, ideal for large organizations and managed security providers.

• Feature Parity: Offers best-of-breed protection, visibility, and control across heterogeneous IT environments including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Kubernetes.

• Advanced Platform Capabilities:

  • Binary Vault: Stores copies of executed files (benign and malicious) for forensic review and reverse engineering.

  • Remote Script Orchestration (RSO): Enables remote investigation and response on multiple endpoints concurrently.

  • Storyline Active Response (STAR): Allows custom Indicators of Compromise (IOC) based rules for real-time analysis, alerting, and automated response workflows, integrating threat intelligence feeds.

  • Data Retention: Offers data retention for up to three years or more for retrospective analysis and proactive threat hunting.

  • Cloud Funnel: Securely streams endpoint telemetry to a customer’s local data lake for correlation with other tools and offline storage.

• IT and Security Operations Features: Helps identify software/application vulnerabilities, fix insecure configurations, and manage endpoints with capabilities like Application Inventory, Scanless Vulnerability Assessment, Device Control, Native Operating System Host Firewall Control, and File Integrity Monitoring.

• Singularity Platform Solution Offerings:

  • Singularity Core: Entry-level EPP (Endpoint Protection Platform) solution.

  • Singularity Control: Adds "security suite" features for endpoint management.

  • Singularity Complete: Flagship offering with comprehensive EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) capabilities.

  • Singularity Commercial & Enterprise: Provide AI-powered foundational/comprehensive protection across identities, endpoints, and the cloud.

• Singularity AI-SIEM: A cloud-native SaaS solution powered by SDL, processing massive amounts of live data in real-time, offering log management, data analytics, and alerting with unparalleled speed and efficiency. It enhances security posture, cyber resilience, SOC efficiency, and compliance. AI SIEM is a cloud-native security information and event management platform that redefines SOC operations through AI-powered automation and unified data analysis. It replaces legacy SIEMs by integrating autonomous threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities across hybrid environments.

• Endpoint Security (EPP and EDR): Provides autonomous real-time protection across Windows, Linux, macOS, and cloud workloads. Its ActiveEDR capabilities leverage Storylines to reduce analysis time, automate responses, and offer Deep Visibility Threat Hunting with one-click responses. It also covers mobile devices (iOS, Android, ChromeOS) with local, adaptive, real-time threat defense.

• Cloud Security: Offers both agent and agentless capabilities in a comprehensive CNAPP.

  • Agent-based CWS: Extends distributed, autonomous protection to compute workloads in public/private clouds and on-premise data centers, offering full EPP/EDR and Cloud Application Control.

  • Agentless CNAPP Solutions: Include Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), Cloud Data Security (CDS), and AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) for generative AI models and pipelines.

• Identity Security: Singularity Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) detects real-time identity attacks, reduces attack surface by identifying misconfigurations and credential exposures, and enforces zero-trust principles.

• Exposure and Vulnerability Management: Solutions like Singularity Network Discovery (formerly Ranger), Extended Security Posture Management (xSPM), and Singularity Vulnerability Management (VM) control the network attack surface, discover/identify/contain device-based threats, track assets, provide risk scores, and offer real-time insights into vulnerabilities.

• Threat Services:

  • Singularity MDR / Vigilance MDR: Provides 24/7/365 managed detection and response beyond endpoints, combining AI automation with human expertise to address talent shortages and alert volumes.

  • WatchTower: Delivers intelligence-driven threat hunting and insights into emerging threats, APT campaigns, and cybercrimes.

  • PinnacleOne: A strategic advisory group helping organizations manage technology and cybersecurity risks through board briefings, c-suite coaching, threat modeling, and incident planning/management.

Growth Strategy

SentinelOne's growth strategy focuses on several key areas:

• Innovation and Enhancement: Continuously expanding platform modules and capabilities, leveraging AI and data convergence, and hiring top global talent.

• New Customer Acquisition: Expanding customer base across organizations of all sizes globally, including Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and government organizations (e.g., FedRAMP High certified). They use a product-first approach and leverage channel and alliance partners.

• Increased Adoption within Customer Base: Growing revenue by encouraging existing customers to deploy additional licenses, adopt adjacent solutions, and activate more platform functionalities and Singularity modules. This "land-and-expand" strategy is evidenced by a dollar-based net retention rate of 110% as of January 31, 2025.

• Global Expansion: Increasing international customer base and investments in operations across Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America (non-U.S. revenue was 37% for FY25).

• Strategic Acquisitions: Evaluating acquisition prospects that align with their platform, customers, and market opportunities to extend the Singularity Platform into adjacencies (e.g., acquisition of KSG for PinnacleOne in Nov 2023, and PingSafe for CNAPP in Feb 2024 to bolster cloud security).

Market Position and Competition

SentinelOne competes in a dynamic market characterized by evolving IT environments and frequent new offerings. While some competitors have greater brand awareness, SentinelOne believes it competes favorably due to its autonomous and AI-powered threat prevention, detection, response, and hunting capabilities.

Competitors include:

• Endpoint security providers: CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc., Carbon Black.

• Legacy antivirus providers: Trellix, Symantec, Microsoft Corporation.

• General network security providers: Palo Alto Networks, Inc..

• SIEM providers: Cisco Systems, Inc. (formerly Splunk), Elastic.

• Cloud security providers: Wiz, Inc..

SentinelOne competes based on factors such as:

• Technology's ability to detect, prevent, and block threats.

• Breadth of functionality.

• Ability to automate threat prevention and remediation with limited human intervention.

• Platform performance and speed of threat hunting.

• Support for cloud, hybrid, and on-premise deployments and various operating systems.

• Platform data retention capabilities.

• Integration with other security ecosystem participants.

• Ease of use, management, and maintenance.

• Quality of MDR service and customer support.

• Strength of sales, marketing, and channel partner relationships.

• Independent Validation: Solutions are regularly assessed by third-party researchers and test labs (e.g., MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK, Gartner EPP Magic Quadrant), consistently recognized for high-fidelity detection, minimal performance overhead, and advanced threat response.

Market opportunity

• Partnership Ecosystem: Works with ISVs, alliance partners, MSPs, MSSPs, MDRs, OEMs, and IR firms. Offers multi-tenancy and management flexibility to partners, enabling them to build and innovate on top of SentinelOne's technology. Partners act as "force multipliers". The Singularity Marketplace further allows seamless integration of dozens of third-party applications for extended detection and response workflows.

See our upcoming Quick Take on the financials and prospects for the company