The funding was led by major names from Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and comes after Wiz executives signaled an aggressive push with channel partners.
Wiz on Tuesday announced a new $12 billion round of funding as the four-year-old company sees increased growth in the cloud security and artificial intelligence markets.
This massive funding was led by major names from Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This comes after senior company executives told CRN that Wiz is seeking an aggressive push with channel partners for its next phase of growth.
(RELATED: Wiz aims to make 'huge' push for channel with executive hires and partner hiring)
The $12 billion valuation represents an increase from the company's previous valuation of $10 billion from its early 2023 funding round, which was already the highest among cybersecurity companies. Wiz has now raised a total of $1.9 billion in funding since its launch in 2020.
Wiz has experienced incremental growth throughout its four-year history – initially with its Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) offering, which delivers rapidly improved cloud visibility and security. The company last year surpassed $350 million in annual recurring revenue and has expanded its technology into a broad Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) provider covering security for the cloud, code, data, and AI.
Earlier this year, Wiz hired former Zscaler COO Dali Rajic as president and COO as it works to go public.
“We want to become a public company. That's our overall goal,” Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said in a recent interview with CRN. “I would say that when we reach probably $1 billion in ARR, that will be “A time when we should be thinking more seriously about an IPO.”
In the press release announcing the new financing on Tuesday, Wiz specified that the move will fuel the continued expansion of its CNAPP while helping the company “set its sights on an eventual IPO.”
In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, Thrive Capital also co-led the funding round and included contributions from Greylock and Wellington Management. Existing investors who participated in the round include Index Ventures, Cyberstarts, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
In the press release, Sarah Wang, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, described Wiz as a “pioneer in cloud security” who has demonstrated “remarkable agility, adaptability, and a deep understanding of market dynamics” — ultimately making the company a “powerful player” in the security space. Cyber.
The funding also comes as Wiz embarked on its first acquisition by acquiring two startups, Gem Security and Raftt, since December.
Partner payment
Meanwhile, Rappaport and Rajic told CRN in February that Wiz is making its channel efforts a top priority in 2024 after a series of executive hires that seek to enable faster growth that relies on partners in the vendor's cloud security and AI.
Wiz executives said it's an ideal time for the company to accelerate its efforts with partners given the growing demand for security tools that can protect cloud environments and use generative AI applications.
“In cybersecurity, partners are very important in the success of a company. So we've always seen this as having huge potential that we can leverage. I think there's a lot we can do,” Rappaport said.
“We will devote more resources to this to make sure that we align with partners to meet the tremendous demand that we see in the market,” he previously told CRN. “This will be our number one priority in the next few years.”
Rajic previously said that while the success of Wiz was already great, he believed there was a “tremendous” opportunity to work with a broader range of channel partners as part of its continued growth drive.
The funding announced Tuesday also came in the midst of the RSA 2024 conference in San Francisco, where Wiz has a prominent presence including on the exhibit hall (pictured above).
Recent major additions to the Wiz cloud and AI security platform have included native AI security capabilities with the AI-SPM (AI Security Posture Management) offering. Wiz's AI-SPM aims to protect the use of AI tools during the software development process, while the vendor has also expanded the technology to support the OpenAI API platform.
