Wiz closes mammoth $1B round at $12B valuation to grow its cloud security platform – Business

Fast-growing cloud security startup Wiz Inc. today disclosed that it has raised a $1 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.

The investment, which also included contributions from more than a half-dozen other investors, brings Wiz’s total outside funding to $1.9 billion. The company says that it’s now worth $12 billion. The milestone comes about four years after Wiz was launched by Chief Executive Officer Assaf Rappaport (pictured, center left), with co-founders Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik.

An enterprise cloud environment can have upwards of hundreds of software components with thousands of configuration settings. Wiz offers a platform that promises to provide a single pane of glass for securing those components. The company says that its software can remediate risks across cloud instances, serverless functions, databases and a range of other technology assets.

Cybersecurity products spot threats by collecting telemetry from a company’s systems and scanning it for anomalies. Often, telemetry is collected using an agent, a lightweight data collection program. Organizations have to install such agents in every cloud instance they wish to protect, which can involve a significant amount of manual work at a company with thousands of instances.

Wiz says that its platform collects cybersecurity data without the use of agents. According to the company, that approach not only removes the manual work involved in setting up data collection programs but also avoids the need to maintain those programs over time. Wiz claims that its platform takes only a few minutes to deploy.

The software can spot vulnerabilities in a company’s Kubernetes installation, the infrastructure-as-a-code scripts it uses to configure cloud instances and other low-level components. Wiz also spots more subtle issues. It can, for example, identify situations where a cloud-based folder containing sensitive data is accessible to an unnecessarily large number of users.

In addition to spotting cloud vulnerabilities, Wiz detects attempts by hackers to exploit them. For every breach it identifies, the company’s platform generates a graph that visualizes what systems were compromised and in what order. An accompanying natural language explanation describes the tactics the hackers used along with the breach’s severity.

After Wiz spots a hacking attempt, administrators can use a set of built-in incident response tools to block it. The company says that its platform is capable of remediating some cybersecurity risks automatically. When it spots a more complicated breach, Wiz sends an alert to the relevant members of the cybersecurity teams.

The company’s platform is used by more than 40% of the Fortune 500. Last year, Wiz disclosed that its annual recurring revenue has exceeded $350 million. Rappaport told the Wall Street Journal that the company intends to grow that number to $1 billion before going public.

In the meantime, the cybersecurity provider will use its latest funding round to hire more workers and enhance its platform. “This funding round will help us continue to solve customers’ complex cloud security challenges in an elegant, simple manner while supporting their broader vendor consolidation efforts,” Rappaport said.

Wiz will make more acquisitions to support its growth strategy. Since its last funding round early last year, the company has acquired two venture-backed startups in the development tooling and cybersecurity segments.

In December, Wiz bought Raftt Inc., which built a platform that helps developers build software for Kubernetes environments. It later inked a deal to acquire Gem Security Inc., a startup with a platform that enterprises can use to find and fix vulnerabilities in their cloud environments. Wiz reportedly paid $350 million for the latter company.

Photo: Wiz