Prague as a bridge between Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley. The American SentinelOne is already at home in Karlín
Billion dollar investment and plan to attract the best IT talents from the domestic market. With this, the American technology company SentinelOne entered the Czech Republic last summer. And her vision to build an engineering center on a green field in Karlín as a base for the whole of Europe is taking concrete shape.
The generously glazed Missouri Park building is one of the newest additions to Karlin’s River City office campus. The American SentinelOne has found its new home on the first three floors, from where you can overlook the panorama of Prague from Prague Castle to Štvanice through the giant windows.
It is relatively quiet at the moment in the light-filled spaces furnished in Scandinavian style. However, in the next two years, the company plans to triple the number of employees in the newly emerging European engineering headquarters. In total, he wants to employ at least 300 people in the Prague innovation center, and according to the company’s vice president for engineering, Martin Matula, who heads the Karlín headquarters, the plan is running without complications.
Defense with artificial intelligence behind it
In the 15 months since its arrival in the Czech Republic, the American company has already recruited 135 employees. Apart from Prague, where most of them are concentrated, roughly a fifth of people work in Brno co-working and several work remotely from other places. Most of the employees work in engineering, a smaller part consists of, for example, recruiters, customer support workers, and the sales team is continuously expanding.
SentinelOne’s core business is cyber security – developing software that can detect most threats and respond to a wide range of attacks by itself using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company was founded as a startup back in 2013, backed by former employees of the American-Israeli Check Point, the Israeli army, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Intel and McAfee.
It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with other branches in Boston, Amsterdam, Eugene or Tokyo, and still has a very strong base in Tel Aviv, where it recently concentrated all its engineering.
The Prague center is in this unique position. “We represent such a bridge between Tel Aviv and the United States, because we get along with both sides and we complement each other well culturally,” says Martin Matula, who joined SentinelOne last year from the position of vice president of engineering at Avast.
The contact of Prague’s Karlín with Tel Aviv is quite frequent. SentinelOne builds its teams across countries. “Within engineering, we have a team structure based on competencies, not geography. So I, too, have teams in my organization built around responsibility for a certain part of the product, regardless of where those people sit. I have people from Tel Aviv and Prague in my teams,” explains Matula.
Praise of Czech talents
The goal is to build a large European innovation hub with hundreds of engineers in Karlín. And grow to a similar size to Tel Aviv. Prague has something to lean on during this growth. “One can only hear praise for Czech talents,” notes Martin Matula with satisfaction. With the growth to date, the company plans to hire another four dozen people by the end of the year, in line with the Czech Republic. And demand for highly valued goods: product for backend, frontend and infrastructure.
In return, in addition to an international background, it offers them an interesting product and a mission associated with it. And also a share in the success – every employee receives a package of employee shares upon joining, and you can earn other actions in the form of bonuses.
The company has been traded on the New York Stock Exchange since last year, and its current value is estimated at $7.4 billion. Last year, it also grew thanks to the acquisition of the American company Scalyr for 155 million dollars, and this year saw the acquisition of the company Attivo Networks. Revenues are growing by more than one hundred percent, making SentinelOne the fastest growing tradable company in cybersecurity and among the largest players.
Today, its autonomous platform can perfectly secure desktops, servers, the cloud and mobile phones, and in addition to further expanding its services, the company is also trying to make its product as user-friendly as possible.
“Customers can see different domains and different areas of security through one user interface. As a result, they can manage with a much smaller security team to cover all threats,” adds SentinelOne Vice President.
Authentic culture and Karlin comfort
Czech teams are directly involved in a whole range of innovations. For example, on the virtual marketplace, which allows third-party products to be integrated into the Sentinel platform. The transformation of the core of the product on a modular platform is also managed from Karlín, and a team in charge of the security of mobile devices is being created in Prague.
The specific culture and environment of Karlín should also attract new people to the Czech innovation center. “It is an ideal location not far from the center, there are nice restaurants and cafes. You can cycle to work or go for a run after work. It has an authentic spirit,” Matula praises the Karlín Technology Park.
SentinelOne wants to be home. They actively participate in know-how sharing events organized by other companies. “And we ourselves are starting to participate in organizing other meetups in our premises,” adds the head of the Prague center.
But there are definitely not only Czechs in his team. The staff includes people from a range of countries from Argentina to Uzbekistan, cementing the role of English as the main company language. And since new faces are added every week, I try to keep in touch. “Every Thursday morning we have a joint breakfast where we get together and share what’s new across the company. People who work remotely have breakfast with us virtually via Zoom. And once a month we meet in a pub in Prague and Brno,” he explains.
According to Matula, SentinelOne’s culture is built primarily on authenticity. “In large corporations, people often do not find meaning in their work. But we only do things that make sense. And we always explain why we do them. When someone has an idea, nothing stops them,” adds Martin Matula.