Wiz Inc., a cybersecurity startup that passed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue last year, has raised $300 million from investors to support its business momentum.
Wiz announced the Series D funding round today. The round was jointly led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Wiz is now valued at $10 billion, $4 billion more than what it was worth after its previous funding round in late 2021.
New York-based Wiz sells a software platform that helps companies detect vulnerabilities and malicious activity in their cloud environments. According to the startup, its customer base includes more than 35% of the Fortune 100. Wiz launched in 2020 and reached the $100 million annualized recurring revenue mark last August.
“The rapid growth of Wiz is a measure of the value we deliver to our customers,” Wiz co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Assaf Rappaport wrote in a blog post today. “By partnering closely with each one of our customers – we learned the complexity as well as the business and operational challenges they face. We’ve learned how important is the partnership between security and development teams to build cloud securely.”
Many cybersecurity tools make use of agents, programs that run in a company’s cloud environment and collect data about potential threats. Wiz says that its platform collects cybersecurity data without using agents, which makes it simpler to install. The startup claims that customers can deploy the platform in as little as a few minutes.
Many companies configure their cloud environments using infrastructure-as-a-code scripts, simple programs that can define settings automatically to save time for administrators. Wiz’s platform detects when such scripts may contain vulnerable setting definitions. The platform can, for example, determine if a cloud environment has misconfigured network security rules.
Wiz also spots other types of security weak points. It can detect user accounts that have access to more systems than they necessarily require. If left unfixed, such accounts can potentially be compromised by hackers and used to launch cyberattacks.
Cloud environments’ settings change regularly as companies roll out new applications and update existing ones. Whenever a cloud environment’s settings change, vulnerabilities can potentially emerge. Wiz says that its platform continuously scans for new vulnerabilities and provides automated remediation features for fixing them.
In addition to insecure configuration settings, Wiz can detect vulnerable code and malicious activity. The startup’s platform not only flags malicious actions such as unauthorized login attempts, but also provides contextual data. Wiz can highlight which user or program performed an unauthorized action and what systems are affected.
Wiz has made significant investments in engineering over the past few quarters. In 2022, the startup rolled out tools for detecting malicious activity, vulnerable software containers and insecurely stored business data.
Using its latest funding, Wiz plans to continue enhancing its platform as well as open three new offices in Austin, Dallas and Washington, DC. The startup will expand its approximately 650-strong workforce to support the growth initiative.