Assaf Rappaport CEO and Co Founder Wiz (Company Photo)
The startup Wiz, which offers cloud computing services, was already set to become the next Israeli unicorn. But now instead of just expecting a $1 billion valuation, it will be worth as much as $1.7 billion. According to Globes the company reached this height when it closed $130 million in new funding.
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 a little over 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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Israel’s most renowned cybersecurity firm Check Point defines cloud computing as the delivery of hosted services, including software, hardware, and storage, over the Internet. The benefits of rapid deployment, flexibility, low up-front costs, and scalability, have made cloud computing virtually universal among organizations of all sizes, often as part of a hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure architecture.
Cloud security, in turn, refers to the technologies, policies, controls, and services that protect cloud data, applications, and infrastructure from threats.
Startup Nation seems to be awash with new unicorns these days. 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 is 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.
Axonius, an Israeli cybersecurity startup, is also now worth more than $1 billion. The company declared this to be the case when it added another $100 million in new investment. Israeli startup Aqua Security also made unicorn status recently.
In January, the Israeli fintech company Melio announced the raising of $110 million in Round B funding which gave it a $1.3 billion valuation, just a year and a half since the company launched in May 2019.
