Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz raises $300M in new funding, pushing its valuation to $10 billion

Despite the ongoing funding lull, AI and cybersecurity startups continue to raise a massive amount of funding. Investors have been pouring billions of dollars into AI as they look for the next ChatGPT. In addition, the rise in cyberattacks has also led to an increase in the number of innovative cybersecurity startups aiming to help companies stay ahead of the bad actors.

One of the leading startups is Wiz, a three-year-old US-Israeli cybersecurity startup founded by engineers who sold their last company to Microsoft.

Today, Wiz announced it raised $300 million in private funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing investors Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Wiz will use part of the funding proceeds to open new offices in Austin, Dallas, and Washington D.C.

The latest round pushes the company valuation to $10 billion. Since its founding three years ago, Wiz has raised $900 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Blackstone, and G Squared.

We covered Wiz back in 2021 after the company raised $250 million in a private funding round, more than tripling its valuation to $6 billion, making it a new member of the highly-coveted unicorn club. In just a few months, Wiz grew its employee count from 65 in March 2021 to over 650.

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. It said its platform is used by 15% of Fortune 500 companies.

Wiz said the fresh funding was backed by most of the investors from its previous round including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Greenoaks, Salesforce, with participation from CyberStarts, billionaire Bernard Arnault and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.

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 actionable, graph-based analysis, and all completely agentless. Investors are also paying close attention and opening their wallets to Wiz.

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.