It’s rare for any start-up to be able to develop and release a breakthrough enterprise software product in under a year. It’s even rarer when that product targets a critical function like cybersecurity, where cutting corners is not an option. And it’s just about unprecedented when that product is so vital that Fortune 500 companies like Home Depot, United Airlines, and MassMutual are compelled to adopt it.
By early 2021, Israeli startup Wiz had done that and more since its founding in January 2020. While in stealth mode for most of 2020, the Wiz team developed its core product, which can identify security exposures in the cloud infrastructure that organizations use to run their vital operations. The easy-to-deploy tool can search systems without any added code or internal infrastructure changes. Within minutes, a user-friendly graph framework reports areas within the company’s cloud stack that could be vulnerable to increasingly common hacks and data leaks. After the diagnosis, Wiz can also step in to remediate the problems.
Assaf Rappaport
CEO, Wiz
This solution is incredibly valuable to enterprises across sectors, as the dual mega-trends of digitization and cloud transition increasingly drive them to utilize complex cloud-based architectures. Advent’s multi-sector, global portfolio gave it insight into these trends, as it observed its tech as a horizontal thesis unfold in real time.
As Wiz looked to the future and the opportunity ahead, Advent was the team’s partner of choice to lead the company’s $130 million Series B in March 2021. Wiz saw parallels in the successful product and go-to-market evolution of other cybersecurity companies that members of the Advent team had helped scale from young promising start-ups to market leading platforms. Advent also brought key relationships, like Operating Partner (and former CISO of Aon) Anthony Belfiore, who would serve as a valuable strategic advisor to the company and a source of dozens of introductions to CISOs at major enterprises globally.
Wiz was valued at $1.7B within a year of its founding
Wiz’s dizzying rise is a testament to the vision and experience of its founding team, which includes CEO Assaf Rappaport as well as Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik. The four sold their previous cybersecurity startup, Adallom, to Microsoft, where its software became part of the tools the software giant sold to its cloud customers.
From that vantage, Rappaport and the rest of the team saw firsthand how critically enmeshed cloud and security were becoming for corporate customers. In many ways, the Wiz team was purpose-built for the problem the company solves. They found in Advent a partner purpose-built for the next phase of the company’s growth.
