Like any good Jewish mother, mine was very worried when I decided to leave Microsoft at the beginning of the pandemic to start another company. My co-founders and I had sold our previous startup to Microsoft in 2015 and spent the next four years building its Cloud Security Group into a $1.5 billion dollar business.
But our customers also made us keenly aware of the challenges they faced securing their cloud environment in real-time across multiple services (Azure, AWS, Google). That's the problem we built Wiz to solve.
So much has happened in the past year and a half. We signed our first multi-million dollar deal six months after writing our first line of code. Wiz has since been adopted by more than 10% of the Fortune 500 and serves a diverse range of customers, from MassMutual to Fox, Blackstone, Salesforce, Slack, The Home Depot, Rivian, DocuSign, and UiPath. Earlier this year we became the fastest unicorn with over $300 million in total funding from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Salesforce, but we did not stop there.
Today we are celebrating another milestone: $250 million in Series C funding at a $6 billion valuation. It's further proof that Wiz is the fastest-growing cybersecurity company ever (My mom still worries). This round was funded by current investors who wanted to double down on Wiz. Insight Partners and Greenoaks Capital co-led with participation from Sequoia, Index, Salesforce, and others.
If Wiz’s growth seems dizzying, it’s because we’re riding unprecedented tailwinds.
COVID spurred the biggest migration wave the cloud has ever seen. As Satya Nadella put it, “we saw two years of digital transformation in 2 months.” It was a matter of survival. 81% of business leaders in a recent survey said COVID accelerated their cloud migration timelines and plans.
But the pandemic also laid bare problems that have been simmering below the surface. Cloud costs are skyrocketing, security breaches are proliferating, and companies can’t hire enough in-house talent to manage and secure their ever-growing environments.
No wonder cloud security is growing more than twice as fast as any other part of the cyber market (>40% year-over-year, according to Gartner).
Because as transformative as it’s been, the cloud doesn’t work by magic. There’s enormous complexity in the background that conceals security holes and obscures whether the customer or cloud provider is responsible for fixing them.
Customers have come to realize ignorance isn’t bliss. Cloud has gotten too big and unwieldy for most companies to effectively manage on their own. Those challenges compound as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, which 92% of organizations say are either in place or underway.
That’s where Wiz comes in. It gives companies nearly instant coverage of their entire multi-cloud environment, and correlates risks to separate signal from noise. We don’t just identify risks – we prioritize them and find attack vectors no other technology can.
But we don’t stop there. We also have a dedicated team of security researchers (ethical hackers) whose sole job is find new attack surfaces in the cloud that put our customers at risk. They’ve already uncovered some of the biggest and best-known vulnerabilities of the year like ChaosDB and OMIGOD. Along with our security engineers, they’ve become an invaluable resource to many enterprises.
Wiz is on a mission to make the cloud less cloudy -- and a lot more secure.
