Wiz team at work (company pic)
Wiz, an Israeli unicorn that offers an API security platform, has now become the “superest” of unicorns, let’s say a “super-duper” unicorn, hitting a $12 billion valuation. That is more than the entire GDP of some nations. The valuation came with a raise of $1 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive Capital.
The raise was the highest ever made by a privately held an Israeli high tech firm.
This means that the investors put $1 billion into Wiz in exchange for less than 10% of the company, leaving earlier investors already seeing a big return on their investments, at least on paper. To put it all into perspective, the firm has now raised a total of $1.9 billion. So, previous investors received larger shares in Wiz for each dollar spent.
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The news comes after Wiz announced in February that it hit $350 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) after only four years in existence. ARR is a key metric used by subscription-based businesses to measure their predictable and recurring revenue. It represents the total amount of revenue a company can expect to receive from its customers over a one-year period, based on their current subscriptions and contracts.
And in March, Wiz bought Gem Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup founded by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces’ vaunted 8200 cyber intelligence unit, for $350 million.
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 became a super unicorn and the world’s biggest cybersecurity startup when it hit a $10 billion valuation in January. The 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.
“We will never stop innovating on behalf of our customers,” said CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport. “Wiz has worked to earn the love of security and development teams; as we bolster our CDR capabilities, SOC teams are also part of that equation. This funding round will help us continue to solve customers’ complex cloud security challenges in an elegant, simple manner while supporting their broader vendor consolidation efforts.”
