Enterprise SaaS · Austin
Sentinel
Security posture management that fixes rather than reports.
- Stage
- Series C
- Founded
- Founded 2017
- First invested
- We invested 2018
- Team
- 193 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $140M
- Current stage
- Series C
- Team
- 193
- Founded
- 2017
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Sentinel builds security posture management that fixes rather than reports. The company started in Austin in 2017. We backed it at seed and have worked with the team through Series C.
- 01
A product that replaces a process rather than adding a dashboard on top of one.
- 02
Deployment that finishes. Most competitors sell well and implement badly.
- 03
Security and procurement work done early, so a large customer is not a nine-month science project.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Annual recurring revenue
- $140M
- Net revenue retention
- 94%
- Median deployment
- 4 weeks
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Sentinel in 2018, back when every large buyer wanted a reference customer who looked exactly like them. What convinced us was not the deck. It was that they answered every hard question with a number and admitted the two they could not answer yet.”
- Rebuilt pricing twice and doubled contract value both times.
- Opened a second market within a year of its seed round.
- Reached default-alive economics before raising a priced round.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Idris Mensah
Co-founder and CEO
Was employee nine at a company that got this wrong, and says so plainly.
Oksana Petrenko
Co-founder and CTO
Prototyped this on nights and weekends for a year before it became the job.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2017
Founded
Idris Mensah and Oksana Petrenko start Sentinel in Austin around a single wedge: security posture management that fixes rather than reports.
- 2018
We invested
We wrote the seed check and took a board seat. David Chen has worked with the team ever since.
- 2019
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2020
Series C round
Raised at $1.6B, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
193 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Bessemer
- Index Ventures
- Costanoa
- Craft Ventures
Working here
Open roles
Sentinel is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Solutions engineering
- Enterprise sales
- Security
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