Assaf Rappaport CEO and Co Founder Wiz (Company Photo)
The startup Wiz, which offers cloud computing services, is set to become the next Israeli unicorn. Startup Nation seems to be awash with new unicorn these days. According to Calcalist, Wiz will reach this milestone when it soon completes another $100 million round of new investment.
Wiz states that it delivers the first cloud visibility solution for enterprise security, offering a “360° view of security risks across clouds, containers and workloads. No agents. No sidecars.”
Wiz was founded just one year ago by Assaf Rapaport, former manager of R&D at Microsoft Israel which built the security stack in Azure, Ami Luttwak Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik. Rapaport and his team in Israel founded Adollam, which was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million.
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A public company is valued by its market cap. This is defined by the total value of its stock. So if 100% of a company is available as stock, and there are 10 million shares trading at $10 then the company is worth $100 million. But how do you value a startup.
A startup, as a new company still privately held, but which aspires to either hold an IPO or get bought out by one of the big players, is, like anything, only worth what people are willing to pay. So if an investor puts up $10 million for a 10% stake in a startup than the company will be valued at $100 million. And if a startup achieves a $1 billion valuation then it is known as a unicorn. And Israel now has plenty of these.
Just yesterday JBN reported on how Axionus achieved a $1 billion plus valuation. The company just declared this to be the case as it added another $100 million in new investment. This latest round followed a 2020 investment of $58 million, increasing total funding to $195 million leaving the startup with unicorn status.
Ami Luttwak recently discussed the cybersecurity market in an interview with Calcalist. “The cybersecurity market is on fire, and that can be felt especially here in Israel because the country is a center of excellence and there are many amazing R&D centers here,” he explained.
“This trend is going to continue as the threats aren’t going anywhere. It is nice to see Israel stand out and we must preserve this. It’s fun to see many Israeli startups in cybersecurity. There are always one or two Israeli startups in any new cyber sector.”
Assaf Rappaport has said about Wiz, “We haven’t been approaching cloud security the right way. It’s based on outdated concepts and we need to finally make the cloud work for security teams. When it’s time for a disruption, there’s nothing like the agility of a startup to drive change.”
