Cyber Security Firm Wiz Raises $250 Million Taking Its Value to $6 Billion
On Monday, cyber security firm Wiz announced it had raised $250 million in a Series C financing round, which brings the entire amount raised by the company to 600 million dollars. It’s been less than two years since the company was founded, at it has reached a $6 billion valuation.
This latest financing round was led by Greenoaks Capital in conjunction with Insight Partners. There was also input from Salesforce ventures, Sequoia Capital, and other firms as well. In a statement, Wiz noted that this funding round was ‘massively oversubscribed’ with the firm having to ‘reject multiple term sheets and restrict the round to existing financiers.’
Wiz was established in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport – CEO, Roy Reznik, Ami Luttwak, and Yinon Costica. This is the same team that built another cyber security firm; Adallom, which Microsoft acquired in 2015 for 320 million dollars.
The 250-million-dollar investment comes four months after a Series B financing round where Wiz raised 120 million dollars from companies such as Salesforce Ventures and American Billionaire Howard Shultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks for 14 years.
Wiz also raised money from Blackstone, Algae Ventures, the investment vehicle of one of the world’s richest men, Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy). This investment pushed the value of this cyber security company to 1.8 Billion dollars at the time.
This cyber security company has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel, an office in Palo Alto, California, and Europe. Currently, the company has 160 full-time employees.
Wiz has built a platform that companies can utilize to scan their cloud structures and workloads, evaluate cloud risk factors and architecture, determine critical risks, and beef up their cloud surroundings.
The company says that its agent-less technology provides businesses with security coverage for the whole cloud environment in a matter of minutes, thereby diminishing risk. In addition, Wiz notes that over 10% of the Fortune 500 companies are its clients. This list included Blackstone, DocuSign, Fox, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., Salesforce, Slack, among others.
The company’s CEO is quoted saying, ‘our platform gives businesses nearly instant coverage of their whole multi-cloud environments and compares risks to isolate signal from noise. We don’t just pinpoint risks. We prioritize them and find attack vectors that no other platform can.”
“And we don’t stop there; we also have a team of dedicated security investigators or ethical hackers whose only role is to find new attacks in the cloud that put our clients at risk.”
Jeff Horing, the managing director and co-founder of Insight Partners, and a Wiz board member, says, “Wiz’s progress in the enterprise space is impressive. When you have a proven team like this, who’ve built a game-changing platform, you bet big. Wiz is establishing a security technology apparatus that the world needs. “
Wiz was founded just as the pandemic began spreading rapidly around the world. Covid-19 sent entire companies and their employees online and prompted a massive migration to the cloud, with major cloud providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) reporting record growth.
According to tech research and consulting from Gartner, the pandemic made cloud security grow significantly, indicating a 40% growth in user spending between 2020 and 2021. As per the Research and Markets report, today, the global security market is estimated to be worth 35 billion dollars, and it’s expected to rise to 67 billion dollars by 2026.
In a statement, Rappaport says that despite the concerns of building a startup during a pandemic, “I’ve realized today that our capacity to adjust quickly to a changing reality is what lead us to develop at an incredible pace and become an actual global company.”
In recent months, Wiz revealed a couple of potentially serious susceptibilities, including Cosmos DB vulnerability, also known as ChaosDB and OMIGOD, which affects Microsoft Azure clients. They also identified a new DNS attach technique that allows for nationwide spying.
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