Wiz vs. Orca: Delaware court sets stage for high-stakes IP showdown
Wiz vs. Orca: Delaware court sets stage for high-stakes IP showdown
The court rejected Wiz’s request to dismiss Orca’s lawsuit outright, setting a trial date for December 2025
The legal battle between Israeli cyber unicorns Wiz and Orca Security continues to heat up after the Delaware court rejected Wiz's request to dismiss Orca’s lawsuit outright. Orca filed the lawsuit in July last year, alleging that Wiz infringed on its patents by copying its technology. Orca seeks to prohibit the sale of Wiz's allegedly infringing products and demands financial compensation for profits generated from the use of its patents.
The court has appointed expert external consultants, one for each company, to review each other's products and determine if Wiz indeed copied Orca's product. The findings will not be publicly disclosed, but the experts will report to the court. The trial is set to begin before a jury on December 8, 2025.
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Orca Security CEO Gil Geron (Right) and Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport.
(Photos: Orca Security and Nathaniel Tobias)
Court documents reveal that both companies are in the process of document discovery. Orca complained that Wiz has not provided the necessary documents, prompting the court to set a strict schedule for both parties to produce all required technical documents.
In its lawsuit, Orca claims it demonstrated that Wiz built its business by deliberately violating Orca's intellectual property. Orca alleges that it developed and marketed its product before Wiz, accusing Wiz of copying its patents, technology, marketing materials, and even working with the same lawyers who handled Orca’s patent registration.
According to Orca’s original lawsuit, "Wiz was birthed from the very beginning as a counterfeit copy of Orca’s ideas—Mr. Shua (Orca co-founder) had presented Orca’s Platform to Wiz’s founders at Microsoft in May 2019, and the so-called “insight” of which Wiz boasts was nothing more than the misappropriation of Mr. Shua’s ideas and Orca’s technology as presented to Wiz’s founders before they formed Wiz and sought to launch a copycat competitor to Orca. It was at this 2019 meeting that Mr. Shua explained how cloud security would forever be changed by his novel agentless cloud security platform as implemented in Orca’s cloud-native security platform. Within months, the Wiz founders left their lucrative careers at Microsoft to start Wiz, build a clone of Orca’s technology, and compete directly with Orca."
Orca has raised $640 million since its inception, with its latest funding round valuing the company at $1.8 billion in 2021. Wiz, meanwhile, recently raised about $1 billion, led by the American venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $12 billion.
