Cloud Security Startup Wiz At $10BN Valuation In Three Years

Cloud security startup Wiz, founded just three years ago, has secured another $300 million in funding, taking its value to $10 billion.

The company, founded in Tel Aviv and headquartered in New York, says it has become the world’s largest cybersecurity unicorn (company valued at $1 billion or more) and the fastest SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company to achieve a $10 billion valuation.

It attributes its growth to “accelerated global demand for its cloud security platform”.

Wiz analyzes infrastructure hosted in public cloud services for risk factors that could allow hackers to gain control of assets and obtain sensitive customer data.

The Wiz Security Graph identifies, correlates, and prioritizes risks across all layers – network, identity, secrets, workloads – and puts them on the graph, as an alternative to providing a “long list of contextless alerts”.

Wiz protects more than one in four of the Fortune 100 companies, including Avery Dennison, BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, Costco, Chipotle, EA, LVMH, Mars, Salesforce and Slack.

The $300 million Series D round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures, with existing investors participating as well. The funds will be used for product development and hiring. 

Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, a leader of the protests against the Israeli government’s judicial reform, said the money will not enter Israel. 

The judicial reform, which has not yet been set in legislation, would give the government greater sway on selecting judges, while limiting the Supreme Court’s power to strike down legislation.

Israel’s most-watched commercial TV channel, Channel 12, reported that the company has already taken tens of millions of dollars out of the country. 

Wiz was founded in 2020 by Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik, the same team that founded the cloud security company Adallom, which was sold to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015. The group also built Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Security Group.