Backed by SoftBank investment, Wiz pushes plans for expansion in Asia
Japanese investment giant invests in Israeli-founded cloud security unicorn as cloud spending is projected to increase over the coming years in Asia
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Israeli-founded cyber unicorn Wiz announced on Wednesday that it has secured a strategic investment from Japanese tech giant SoftBank to help drive its expansion in the Asian market.
Wiz did not disclose the value of the investment, but it is estimated at tens of millions of dollars, according to market sources. The announcement comes as Wiz in late July walked away from a $23 billion offer by Google parent company Alphabet to acquire the cybersecurity firm.
Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said that instead, the company chose to focus on a growth path to double its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $1 billion by 2025, as it is eyeing plans for an initial public offering (IPO).
Wiz, which says that its platform can secure everything developers build and run in the cloud, was co-founded in early 2020 by Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, the same team that founded the firm Adallom, which was sold to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015.
They also led Microsoft Azure’s Cloud Security Group. It was established just as the COVID-19 pandemic started gaining pace around the world, sending entire enterprises and workers online and spurring a huge migration wave to cloud-based servers.
Wiz said that the SoftBank investment positions the cybersecurity firm as a “key player in the cloud security sector across the continent, bolstering its efforts to expand in Asia,” with a focus on Japan and Australia. That’s as the cyber unicorn seeks to tap into a market where cloud spending is expected to reach $153.6 billion by 2026, increasing from $53.4 billion in 2021, according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Wiz was valued at a staggering $12 billion, after it raised $1 billion in its latest private funding round in May for future merger and acquisition efforts, talent recruitment and product development.
In recent months, Wiz hired dozens of employees in Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, and established a new data center in Sydney. The company plans to double its number of employees on the continent by the end of 2024 and is actively recruiting employees and investing in sales and market education infrastructure in the region. Wiz customers in the Asia region include News Corp and Canva.
Headquartered in New York, the software firm currently employs over 1,200 people, primarily in the US, with the rest spread across Tel Aviv, Europe, and Asia. Customers include 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, such as Slack, Mars, BMW, DocuSign, Plaid and Agoda.
