Wiz, a 1-year-old Israeli cybersecurity startup founded by engineers who sold their last company to Microsoft, is now worth $1.7 billion

No day goes by without news of startups raising new funding. But not all fundraising rounds are the same. Last year, we told you GitLab, a fully-remote startup with over 1000 employees in more than 65 countries, that is now worth more than $6 billion. What makes the story of GitLab so unique is the fact that the startup has been in operations since 2012 without any physical office.

Today, we would like to share another story of a tiny startup you probably never heard of. Wiz is a one-year-old cybersecurity startup founded by engineers who sold their last company to Microsoft. Wiz was co-founded in 2020 by four Israeli founders Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, Assaf Rappaport, and Roy Reznik. They sold their previous security startup company, Adallom, to Microsoft for a reported $320 million in 2015.

Last year during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the founders saw new opportunities after learning about how companies were adopting cloud services at Microsoft. They decided to launch Wiz, a new startup that provides the first cloud visibility solution for enterprise security teams. Wiz is an online tool that identifies security issues lurking in the public cloud infrastructure that organizations are increasingly using to run the software so that administrators can quickly take action.

Wiz analyzes the entire cloud environment to deliver a 360° view of security risks across clouds, containers and workloads. The solution dives deep on risks with an actionable, graph-based analysis and allcompletely agentless. Investors are also paying close attention and opening their wallets to Wiz. With just 65 employees, Wiz has recently raised $130 million funding round at a $1.7 billion making it a new member of the highly-coveted unicorn club.

Wiz says its unique architecture allows for seamless scanning of a given organization’s entire cloud environment across all computer types and cloud services for vulnerabilities, configuration, network, and identity issues without agents or sidecars.

“When our founding team was leading the Microsoft Cloud Security Group, we saw firsthand how security teams struggled with the complexity of existing approaches to securing the cloud,” Rappaport said in December.

“We knew that by embracing a cloud-native approach, we could make a product that is simple to deploy and scale, allowing security teams to focus on real risks. We’re excited to partner with such an experienced and well-respected team of investors again as we look to accelerate our growth in 2021, and meet the market demand for an elegant cloud security platform that works,” he explained.