Israel-founded cyber unicorn Wiz raises $1 billion, soaring to $12 billion valuation

The US-Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup plans to use the funds to go on an acquisition spree, hire more employees, boost product development

Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.

Founders of US-Israeli cyber unicorn Wiz from left to right: VP Product Yinon Costica, CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, and VP R&D Roy Reznik. (Avishag Shaar-Yashuv)
Founders of US-Israeli cyber unicorn Wiz from left to right: VP Product Yinon Costica, CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, and VP R&D Roy Reznik. (Avishag Shaar-Yashuv)

Four years after it was founded, American-Israeli cloud cybersecurity unicorn Wiz is valued at a staggering $12 billion, after raising $1 billion in its latest private funding round announced on Tuesday.

The capital injection will be used for future merger and acquisition efforts, talent recruitment and product development, Wiz said. In the last funding round in February 2023, Wiz raised $300 million at a $10 billion valuation. To date, the cyber unicorn has secured a total of $1.9 billion from investors.

“2024 is the year of consolidation – for Wiz, and the industry at large,” said Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport. “Our growth trajectory will continue to be aided by strategic acquisitions that propel us forward and enable us to cover more ground in less time.”

Earlier this year, Wiz snapped up Israeli cyber startup Gem Security for a reported $350 million and at the end of 2023, it bought Tel Aviv startup Rafft for an undisclosed sum.

Wiz, which says that its platform can secure everything developers build and run in the cloud, 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.

The latest investment round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital with participation from Greylock and Wellington Management. Existing investors Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital also joined. Other private investors and entrepreneurs include Bernard Arnault and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.

Back in February, the cyber unicorn announced a hiring plan as the startup embarks on a revenue growth path and eyes a public stock offering. As part of the plan, Wiz is adding another 400 employees over the coming year, and increasing its headcount in Israel, the United States, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Headquartered in New York, the Israeli-founded software startup employs 900 people, out of which at least 150 currently work in Israel.

Wiz 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. Its customers include 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, such as Slack, Mars, BMW, DocuSign, Plaid and Agoda.

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