Assaf Rappaport CEO and Co Founder Wiz (Company Photo)
Wiz, an Israeli cloud security startup and a unicorn, just became a super unicorn and the world’s biggest cybersecurity startup when it hit a $10 billion valuation on Monday. The new valuation came with a $300 million raise in a Series D funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing investors Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Wiz also became the fastest SaaS company to achieve a $10 billion valuation.
The news comes after Wiz took part in a national “strike” or “work stoppage” held by Israeli high-tech firms that halted all work at midday to protest the Israeli government’s policies. Held a few weeks ago, the strike was a protest against the planned judicial reforms that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is now passing in the Knesset. People fear that the reforms would end Israel’s democratic nature.
And now, because of the current government plans, Wiz stated, “To our regret, due to the judicial revolution, the money we have raised will not enter Israel.”
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“Our biggest concern regarding Israeli high-tech is not only the money leaving Israel, but also the many funds that will no longer enter the country,” said the company’s CEO Assaf Rappaport. “I hear from all over the voices of worried investors, of entrepreneurs who are secretly taking money out of the country, and of workers who fear for their future in Israel. Wiz has been successful to date thanks to an amazing ecosystem that exists in Israel, but that ecosystem is currently facing an existential threat.”
Wiz was founded in March 2020 by the team that led Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group and built the security stack in Azure. CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik, have worked together for more than 15 years and previously founded Adallom (acquired by Microsoft for $320 million), which is now the #1 Cloud Access Security Broker in the market.
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.”
“The rapid growth of Wiz is a measure of the value we deliver to our customers,” said Assaf Rappaport. “By partnering closely with each one of our customers – we learned the complexity as well as the business and operational challenges they face. We’ve learned how important is the partnership between security and development teams to build cloud securely.
“Wiz has introduced a new approach,” added Rappaport, “one that enables the business to embrace the cloud securely by continuously identifying and reducing the risks that matter. Wiz is rolled out in minutes via an agentless, API-centered approach to seamlessly scan workloads and give full visibility of cloud environments. Our unique use of the Security Graph enables the triage and correlation of the critical attack paths, producing high-fidelity results that any security or developer team can interpret and respond to immediately.”
