Wiz Raises $250M On $6B Valuation To Support More Clouds

‘Wiz is coming with a different approach to an existing market. We’re enabling the bird’s eye view for the security team,’ Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport tells CRN after closing a $250 million Series C funding round.

Wiz has become the fourth-most-valuable venture-backed cybersecurity company in the world, raising $250 million on a $6 billion valuation less than two years after its founding.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based cloud security startup plans to use the Series C proceeds to extend its support beyond Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, according to co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport. The push beyond the big public cloud providers will provide multinational or international customers of Wiz with security for more localized cloud options, Rappaport said.

“Every company is a multi-cloud company,” Rappaport told CRN. “I think that some clouds are being chosen because of their geographic presence and the need to be localized. … [If you’re a security team], Wiz enables you to very quickly understand what’s going on in your cloud.”

[Related: Cloud Security Startup Wiz Raises $120M In Salesforce-Led Round: Report]

Wiz’s expanded war chest will also allow the company to pursue mergers and acquisitions should a good opportunity arise, Rappaport said. The company primarily wants to invest organically in its engineering and R&D organizations, but will consider buying companies with good teams, innovative technologies and market traction. Rappaport said Wiz can do more in areas like shift left security and remediation.

The company’s biggest competitor in the enterprise cloud security market is Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud offering, with other cloud security startups like Orca Security and Lacework playing more in the midmarket and SMB spaces, according to Rappaport.

“Wiz is coming with a different approach to an existing market,” Rappaport said. “We’re enabling the bird’s eye view for the security team.”

From a channel perspective, Wiz started as a direct sales company to learn more about its customers, but Rappaport said he was surprised by how quickly consultants and managed security service providers began adding Wiz’s technology to their portfolio of tools. VARs can also resell Wiz in a more traditional fashion, and Wiz has been adopted by DevOps teams to help secure the development life cycle, he said.

“Although the traction is amazing, there’s so many things that we can do and there are so many things that we are doing, and I’m super excited,” Rappaport said.

Wiz has more than tripled its valuation since March, when the company disclosed a $1.7 billion valuation following its first phase of Series B funding. The company’s Series C round announced Monday was co-led by Greenoaks and Insight Partners, and included participation from previous investors Salesforce and Sequoia.

“Wiz’s growth in the enterprise market is astounding,” Jeff Horing, Insight Partners co-founder and managing director, said in a statement. “When you have a proven leadership team like this that’s built a game-changing product, you bet big. Wiz is building security technology the world needs.“

Wiz was founded in January 2020 and emerged from stealth in December 2020 with an astronomical $100 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Sequoia, Insight Partners and Cyberstarts. Then in June 2021, the company closed a $250 million Series B round led by Advent International and Salesforce. The Series C haul brings Wiz’s total funding to $600 million just 21 months after the company started.

The company employs 168 people and wants to employ more than 300 people a year from now, Rappaport said. Wiz disclosed its Series C funding less than a week after rival Orca Security announced a $340 million Series C round of its own, which took Orca’s valuation up to $1.8 billion from $1.2 billion seven months earlier. Orca Security employs 216 people, up from just 71 employees a year ago, according to LinkedIn.

Monday’s funding round propelled the company’s valuation past fellow security upstarts OneTrust and Arctic Wolf, and behind only endpoint visibility and control vendor Tanium, application security vendor Snyk and cloud security vendor Netskope, which are worth $9 billion, $8.5 billion, and $7.5 billion, respectively.

Wiz was established by Rappaport and the other founders of cloud access security broker Adallom, who sold their company to Microsoft for $320 million in September 2015, less than three years after Adallom’s 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 2020 to start Wiz.

Wiz said its architecture facilitates scanning of the entire cloud environment across all compute types and cloud services for vulnerabilities, configuration, network and security issues. The company offers a weighted view of risk that allows customers to assess vulnerabilities and misconfigurations based on severity, exposure, exploitability, blast radius and business impact, according to Wiz.