Wiz

Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport (CEO), Ami Luttwak (CTO), Roy Reznik, and Yinon Costica -- the same four founders who had previously built Adallom, a cloud access security broker (CASB) startup they founded in 2012 and sold to Microsoft in July 2015 for roughly $320 million. All four met during Israeli military service; Rappaport served in the IDF's Talpiot program, Unit 81, and then Unit 8200 (cyber/signals intelligence), and briefly worked as a McKinsey consultant before co-founding Adallom. After the Microsoft acquisition, Rappaport became head of Microsoft's Israel R&D Center (overseeing roughly 1,500 employees) and led Microsoft's Cloud Security Group, giving the founding team direct visibility into the scale of unmanaged cloud risk before setting out to build Wiz.

Wiz emerged from stealth in December 2020 with a $100 million Series A (Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Cyberstarts), an unusually large and fast opening round reflecting the founders' pedigree. Growth from there was extraordinarily fast: a $250M Series B in spring 2021 valued the company at $1.7B (unicorn status roughly a year after founding), a $250M Series C in October 2021 pushed the valuation to $6B (with new backers including Salesforce Ventures, LVMH's Bernard Arnault, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz), and a $300M Series D in February 2023 (led by Greenoaks Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners) brought the valuation to $10B. Wiz was widely reported as the fastest software startup ever to scale from $1M to $100M in ARR (achieved between February 2021 and July 2022), and by February 2024 the company disclosed roughly $350M in ARR with a customer base spanning 45%+ of the Fortune 100. Alongside organic growth, Wiz began acquiring: cloud-dev-collaboration startup Raftt (~$50M, December 2023) and cloud detection-and-response startup Gem Security (~$350M, April 2024); a planned ~$1.6B acquisition of competitor Lacework in 2024 was reported but collapsed during due diligence and did not close (Lacework was later acquired by Fortinet).

In March 2024, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai personally emailed Rappaport to express acquisition interest; the two met in person along with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian at the Googleplex in May 2024. By June 2024, Google had offered approximately $23 billion to acquire Wiz outright. In a widely covered decision in July 2024, Rappaport and the board turned the offer down, telling employees the company would instead pursue an IPO and target $1 billion in ARR; Rappaport later explained the rejection publicly, citing conviction in Wiz's independent growth trajectory. Wiz closed a $1 billion Series E round that same month (May 2024, ahead of the rejection), valuing the company at $12 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and Thrive Capital leading and Greylock, Wellington Management, Cyberstarts, and prior investors participating -- capital explicitly earmarked to fund further M&A and pre-IPO scaling. Wiz went on to acquire AI-driven remediation and risk-management startup Dazz for roughly $450 million in November 2024.

Business model

B2B SaaS sold via annual/multi-year subscription (ARR-based) to enterprise security, DevOps, and development teams, sold both directly and via cloud marketplaces and channel partners; agentless deployment (API-based, no software installed on individual workloads).

Recurring subscription revenue tied to cloud workload/resource coverage; reported roughly $350M ARR as of February 2024, with subsequent (unconfirmed in this research) ARR growth reported in press as exceeding $500M-$700M+ through 2025 prior to the Google deal closing.