Cyber unicorn Wiz snaps up Israeli-founded startup Dazz for $450 million
Wiz, recently valued at $12 billion, says the deal will bolster its cloud security platform with AI capabilities to detect and manage security breaches with a faster response time
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Cybersecurity giant Wiz on Thursday announced a deal to buy Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Dazz in the third acquisition by the cloud security unicorn in a year.
Wiz, which says that its cyber platform is tailored to secure everything developers build and run in the cloud, did not disclose the value of the deal, but it is estimated at $450 million.
Headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, Dazz has developed a remediation platform that uses generative AI technologies for root-cause analysis of fast-evolving security threats. The AI platform is geared to automate the process of detecting, prioritizing, and fixing security vulnerabilities for businesses that use cloud services “in hours instead of weeks.”
Wiz said that the Dazz acquisition is part of its strategy to become a multi-product cybersecurity firm. With the integration of the startup’s AI-driven risk prioritization and remediation software, Wiz seeks to bolster its cloud security platform to help security and engineering teams trace cloud issues back to their origin and mitigate breaches with a short response time.
“Wiz has always been committed to empowering organizations to genuinely improve their security posture – not just to report on risks, but to prioritize and resolve them,” said Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport. “Dazz is a powerful addition to Wiz’s mission, bringing an industry-leading solution that’s gained strong market momentum through relentless innovation and AI-driven capabilities.”
Since it was established in 2021 by Merav Bahat (CEO), Tomer Schwartz (CTO), and Yuval Ofir (VP R&D), Dazz has raised a total of $110 million from investors, including Greylock Partners, Insight Partners, Index Ventures, and Cyberstarts. The startup employs 115 people, of whom 60 are based in Israel.
“Exposure management and remediation are top priority for cybersecurity teams across the industry, from Fortune 500 companies to high-growth businesses,” said Bahat. “We are excited to join Wiz to pursue the shared mission of simplifying cloud remediation, while building the world’s leading cybersecurity company together.”
The acquisition marks Wiz’s third in a year. In early 2024, it snapped up Israeli cloud detection and response startup Gem Security for a reported $350 million, and at the end of 2023, it bought Tel Aviv cloud-based developer collaboration platform Rafft for an undisclosed sum.
Wiz raised $1 billion in its latest private funding round in May to expand its cloud security platform through mergers and acquisitions, talent recruitment, and product development. The four year-old unicorn was valued at a staggering $12 billion.
In July, Wiz made big headlines as it walked away from a $23 billion acquisition offer by Google parent company Alphabet. Rappaport said that instead, the company was embarking on a growth path to double its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $1 billion by 2025 and was eyeing plans for an initial public offering (IPO).
Wiz was co-founded in early 2020 by Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, just as the COVID-19 pandemic started gaining pace around the world, sending entire enterprises and workers online and spurring a huge wave of migration to cloud-based servers.
