Cloud Security Firm Wiz Lands $300 Million In Funding, $10 Billion Valuation

The fast-growing company is now the highest-valued privately held cybersecurity vendor, and has been working with solution providers such as Trace3 to bring its platform for securing cloud environments to the market.

Fast-growing cloud security startup Wiz announced Monday that it has raised $300 million in new funding and achieved a valuation of $10 billion in connection with the round, making it the top-valued privately held cybersecurity vendor.

Though only founded in 2020, Wiz quickly found huge traction for its product that brings together numerous cloud security capabilities while deploying quickly and offering greater prioritization of threats.

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Even at just a few years old, Wiz is “already a behemoth” in the world of cloud security, said Katherine Walther, vice president of innovation at Trace3, a Wiz partner and No. 36 on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500.

Key capabilities on the Wiz platform include cloud security posture management (CSPM), which is used to detect misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure and enable remediation of the issues.

Wiz has stood out in the cloud security market with a product that is agentless — helping to enable fast deployment — and that also excels at correlating various signals to allow for better risk prioritization in the cloud. The Wiz platform supports AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and VMware vSphere.

Wiz has also distinguished its cloud security platform in areas including ease-of-use and the ability to dramatically improve visibility for customers, according to Trace3’s Walther.

Security risk is far different in the cloud than in on-premises environments because of how easy it is for users to add new services, Walther noted. And with new functionality arriving constantly, the demands of keeping up with configurations in cloud services have “exceeded human capacity,” she said.

Wiz, however, is helping organizations to get a handle on all of those issues — while also offering unique capabilities related to the identity components of cloud security, Walther said. Wiz has essentially “introduced organizations to the concept of tying these assets to identities,” she said. “That has made the identities more of a part of a holistic security posture, in a way that nothing like that has been done before.”

Ultimately, with all of its moves, Wiz has been “positioning themselves to be pretty tough to beat,” Walther said. Trace3 has been partnering with Wiz since early 2021, and in 2022 the solution provider saw “incredible amounts of growth” in its business with the company, she said.

Overall, Wiz has been “a great partner,” Walther said, noting that Wiz executives such as CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport have often gone the extra mile to directly assist with client interactions.

Rapid Growth

In August 2022, Wiz disclosed that it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, achieving this key startup milestone in the shortest amount of time of any company to date at 18 months, according to the company.

Wiz had previously been valued at $6 billion in connection with its $250 million funding round in October 2021.

With the $10 billion valuation, Wiz moves to the top spot on the list of highest-valued privately held cybersecurity companies, per the CB Insights ranking of unicorn companies, from No. 6 previously — surpassing the previous top-valued security vendor, Tanium, which is valued at $9 billion. In a news release, Wiz said it has become the fastest SaaS company to achieve a $10 billion valuation.

The startup said that it now counts more than 35 percent of Fortune 100 companies in its customer base. Wiz plans to use the new funding to increase its hiring, accelerate its sales and continue its product development.

The $300 million Series D round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Existing investors also joined the round, and Wiz has now raised $900 million in funding to date. Other investors include Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and Blackstone.

The company has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, as well as in New York and Denver, and employs 650. Wiz said it plans to open additional U.S. offices in Austin, Dallas and Washington.

‘More Rigor’ In Cloud Security

For many businesses, cloud security remains “an area where we need to put some more rigor — more of a programmatic approach to how we do security from start to finish inside our organizations,” said Rocky Giglio, director of security go-to-market and solutions at Los Angeles-based SADA, a major Google Cloud partner that doesn’t currently partner with Wiz.

Common cloud misconfigurations can include allowing unauthenticated users to access a cloud storage bucket. As a way to counter the issue, CSPM offers the ability to continuously scan cloud environments to “look for these bad practices and highlight them — and then help you either automate the shutdown of those exposures, or give you an alert so that you can go fix it,” Giglio said.

Ultimately, there’s no question that with the new security risks created by the massive move to the cloud of recent years, “the cloud security posture management trend is really starting to come to the forefront,” he said.