Ex-Microsoft Cloud Security Head Debuts Startup Wiz With $100M In Funding

Wiz was launched in January by Assaf Rappaport and the other founders of cloud access security broker Adallom, who sold their company to Microsoft for $320 million almost three years after its founding.

Cloud security startup Wiz emerged from stealth with an astronomical $100 million in funding just nine months after the founding team wrote its first line of code.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Wiz was launched in January 2020 by CEO Assaf Rappaport and the other founders of cloud access security broker Adallom, who sold their company to Microsoft for $320 million less than three years after its founding. Rappaport and his team then spent nearly four and a half years leading Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group before leaving at the beginning of this year to start Wiz.

“When our founding team was leading the Microsoft Cloud Security Group, we saw firsthand how security teams struggled with the complexity of existing approaches to securing the cloud,” said Rappaport (pictured above) in a statement. ”We knew that by embracing a cloud-native approach, we could make a product that is simple to deploy and scale, allowing security teams to focus on real risks.”

[Related: Microsoft Nears $165M Deal For IoT Security Startup CyberX: Reports]

The Series A funding round was led by Index Ventures, Sequoia, Insight Partners and Cyberstarts, and will allow Wiz to scale and meet customer demand for cloud security tools that provide complete risk visibility and are simple to deploy at scale. Wiz currently employs 23 people, according to LinkedIn.

Wiz said its product was designed from the ground up to provide visibility and risk insight that allow security professionals to focus on things that matter most. The company’s architecture facilitates scanning of the whole cloud environment across all compute types and cloud services for vulnerabilities, configuration, network and identity issues, according to Wiz.

The company said it offers a weighted view of risk that allows customers to assess vulnerabilities and misconfigurations based on severity, exposure, exploitability, blast radius and business impact. Each risk is enriched with the context and the evidence chain to clarify criticality and root cause, allowing customers to triage instantly and speed up response without spending hours troubleshooting, Wiz said.

“The Wiz founding team is among the most customer-obsessed groups of founders I‘ve worked with and it shows in the product they’ve brought to market,” Index Ventures Partner Shardul Shah said in a statement. ”Wiz is the solution that these organizations need to not only secure the investments they’ve made, but to get security teams out in front where they can enable engineering and lines of business to innovate even faster.”

Wiz said its product is already being used by paying customers, including Fortune 100 companies. Customer feedback thus far has highlighted how helpful Wiz‘s powerful data mining and audit software is for the global business ecosystem, according to Insight Partners Managing Partner Jeff Horing.

“We‘re excited to work with Wiz because the team not only understands how to build great products, but they also know how to build a successful team and company,” Horing said in a statement.

Joining Rappaport atop Wiz are Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak, Vice President of Product Yinon Costica and Vice President of Research and Development Roy Reznik. The quartet has worked together for more than 15 years, dating back to their time in the Israel Defense Forces in the mid- to late 2000s and including subsequent stops at Adallom and Microsoft.

Shah, Horing, Sequoia Capital Global Managing Partner Doug Leone and Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts will be joining the Wiz team as board members, according to the company.

“Their past experiences executing at scale and their hunger to build an enduring company will help Wiz lead the market with a new generation of cloud security tools,” Leone said in a statement. “We‘re thrilled to partner again with this exceptional founding team.“