Unstoppable Wiz: Cyber startup nets another $1 billion in funding as valuation jumps to $12B
Unstoppable Wiz: Cyber startup nets another $1 billion in funding as valuation jumps to $12B
The four-year-old decacorn, which took its total funding to date to $1.9 billion, said it will use the latest round of funding to help drive future M&A efforts, along with talent recruitment and product development
Cloud security decacorn Wiz announced on Tuesday that it has raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total funding to $1.9 billion. The current round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive Capital, with participation from Greylock, Wellington Management, and existing investors Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Howard Schultz, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. The round also included a relatively small secondary component estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
The biggest funding round in Israeli tech history comes on the heels of the acquisition of Israeli startup Gem Security, a Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) provider. It was Wiz's second acquisition since its inception in 2020, after the company acquired Israeli startup Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, last December.
Wiz recently announced that it has reached $350 million in ARR, with over 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers. The company previously expressed interest in pursuing M&A opportunities as part of its mission to build a holistic cloud security platform catering to a wide array of industry needs. Wiz is now targeting $1 billion in revenue, ahead of a potential Wall Street IPO.
Wiz was founded by CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik, who according to Forbes now all have a personal fortune of around $1 billion.
Rappaport was previously General Manager of R&D at Microsoft Israel after having sold his previous company Adallom to the tech giant for $320 million in 2015. Wiz’s other co-founders have been with Rappaport since his days in the military and filled various roles at Adallom, too.
At the start of 2024 Dali Rajic, formerly COO and President of Zscaler, joined as COO and President. Wiz said it predicts that 2024 will be “the year of security consolidation” and will use the latest round of funding to help drive future M&A efforts, along with talent recruitment and product development.
“We will never stop innovating on behalf of our customers,” said CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport. “Wiz has worked to earn the love of security and development teams; as we bolster our CDR capabilities, SOC teams are also part of that equation. This funding round will help us continue to solve customers’ complex cloud security challenges in an elegant, simple manner while supporting their broader vendor consolidation efforts.”
Sarah Wang, Andreessen Horowitz: “Wiz is a cloud security pioneer and has demonstrated remarkable agility, adaptability, and a keen understanding of market dynamics. This has enabled smart growth and positioned them as a power player in the cybersecurity space.”
