Wizthe buzzing startup building an all-in-one cloud security platform is on an acquisition spree to rapidly expand its business en route to an IPO.
Now, it has closed a major $1 billion funding round to help it along the way.
Series E – led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive – values Wiz at $12 billion, making it one of the most valuable cybersecurity startups today.
It’s a notable step up from the last time Wiz raised, in February 2023, when it closed a $300 million round to $10.3 billion after money. When rumors of this latest fundraiser hit the market March, the amount was set at $800 million. The fact that the Series E is now at $1 billion speaks to how intense the activity around Wiz is right now. “Iconic” was the word one investor, speaking to TechCrunch, used to describe the company.
(The company confirmed that the E Series also has a small secondary component. Sources close to the deal say it’s around $30 million to $40 million, “a few tens of millions of dollars.”)
Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, said in an interview that Wiz plans to continue growing its platform organically with more talent hires and R&D investments. But with countless cybersecurity startups now in existence, New York sees a great opportunity to grow inorganically through acquisitions, bringing in customers, talent and technology more quickly.
“We see two kinds of opportunities in the market right now,” he said. “There are ex-unicorns” — startups that have raised significant money at valuations exceeding $1 billion but may have failed to grow as expected and are now exploring other options beyond IPO — “and also exciting, newer startups , superstars with a long trajectory ahead of them. We now have the opportunity to join forces with both.”
The large size of this round gives Wiz plenty of room to make cash acquisitions, meaning it will give up less equity in Wiz itself — a nod to the company’s intentions to go public in the future.
The fundraising comes at a time when Wiz is already raising smaller companies. It was just a month ago acquired Gem Security — which Rappaport described today as falling into the latter “exciting, younger” category — for $350 million. A few weeks later, Wiz signed a letter of intent to buy Lacework, the startup that was once valued at $8.3 billion, for just $168 million. (That would make it an “ex-unicorn” in Rappaport’s parlance.) The last deal went cold, we now understand, in due diligence, a reminder that simply having an interest and the money to buy isn’t enough to get deals done. line.
The company has a long list of companies to choose from. By an estimate there are 62 Cyber Startups with recent raised valuations of over $1 billion at this time. The list includes Aqua and Orca — which are unrelated but work together — as well as Netskope, Snyk, Arctic Wolf, Axonius and more. The smaller ones number in the hundreds. All of these compete with much larger players in the market, such as Palo Alto Networks, Crowd Strike and others.
Wiz was founded just four years ago by Rappaport and co-founders Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik (all previously at Microsoft, with startup experience and exit success in their pasts). The company claims to have signed contracts with about 40% of the Fortune 100, with some of its biggest clients including BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, strategic investor Salesforce and Mars.
Together this business now stands at $350 million ARR. That’s still a long way from the $1 billion ARR it aims to have by the end of 2025. However, that goal is another reason the company wants to grow through acquisition.
Wiz’s market appeal is partly due to the area it targets and partly due to its approach.
Businesses have made significant investments in cloud services to accelerate the way they operate and make their IT more agile, but this shift has come with a significantly changed security profile for these organizations: Network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to breach these systems.
Wiz has stood out in a crowded market by taking an all-in-one platform approach. Taking data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data, and network processes for security risk factors and provides a series of detailed views to its users to understand where those risks exist, as well as how to fix them. Its platform currently covers around 13 areas, from code security, container environment security and supply chain security, around which it integrates and collaborates with a number of other startups to build its ecosystem (and flexibility for customers).
Philip Clark, who leads the investment for Thrive Capital, described AI as part of the “next wave of security issues,” and Wiz is also expanding its business there, specifically with AI security posture management.
“It’s meeting customers where their needs are,” Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, told TechCrunch. “There is nothing that directly competes with Wiz in cloud security.”
In the meantime, there are more opportunities. When I spoke with Rappaport on Monday for this story, he had just landed in San Francisco to attend the RSA security conference, where nearly 600 companies will be exhibiting: a ripe shopping opportunity.
The funding — which also included Greylock and Wellington Management, as well as previous backers Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Howard Schultz, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital — brings Wiz’s total raised to $1.9 billion.
That long list of major backers, added to the list that Rappaport said it rejected, underscores the interest investors have in the company right now.
“Wiz is nothing less than a rocket ship,” another investor, Lightspeed’s Arsham Memarzadeh, said in a statement.
