A $10 billion valuation. $200 million in sales. New billionaire Assaf Rappaport has built Wiz into one of software’s fastest-growing startups ever. But the CEO’s ultra-competitive approach is leaving singed eyebrows. My latest cover story for Forbes:
through Tel Aviv’s Pride parade in June, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport looks uneasy. Slim and dressed unassumingly in a gray T-shirt and slacks, he’s with close friends—cofounder Yinon Costica and chief marketing officer Raaz Herzberg—but also a security detail. An hour before, an intruder tried to confront Rappaport in his office, then waited for him in ambush in the courtyard below, motive unknown. Now, an armed plainclothes guard follows just behind as Rappaport navigates the throng.
Enter Wiz, which connects to storage providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure and scans everything it stores in the cloud, flagging and prioritizing security risks. Wiz isn’t the only player capitalizing on the cloud security boom—it faces a revitalized publicly traded giant in Palo Alto Networks and well-funded startup rivals—nor was it even among the first. But it is indisputably the player of the moment.
Still, a big bet like Wiz’s brings pressure. Some industry peers believe the company goes too far with its aggressive growth tactics. One competitor, Orca Security, filed a lawsuit in July accusing it of doing everything from infringing its patents to copying marketing metaphors. Wiz spokesperson Tamar Harel called the suit’s accusations “baseless.”
When the deal closed, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met Rappaport face to face to give him some unexpected marching orders: “I’m here to set the rules, and you’re here to break them.” Tapped to lead Microsoft’s fledgling cloud security unit in the Israeli city of Herzliya, Rappaport took Nadella’s words to heart. He instituted a commuter shuttle program from nearby downtown Tel Aviv, where he and other young employees preferred to live, and hid the office’s corporate art in a bomb shelter closet.
Wiz’s solution: a tool that could run without a lengthy download process , with a handy interface any developer could understand. Within minutes of a customer turning over its AWS or Azure credentials, Wiz could check every connection and pathway connecting them to the outside world. A dashboard called the “risk graph” would prioritize the most critical issues, helping developers know where to spend time.
“We’re fighting giants,” Rappaport says with a shrug, noting that Palo Alto Networks has similar resources at its disposal. “I need to have the ability to invest in order to compete, because the opportunity is huge.”as tech IPOs ground to a halt and startups found access to fresh funds mostly dried up, Douglas Leone, the billionaire former global leader of Sequoia, wrote a memo to the firm’s portfolio CEOs, urging them to focus on profits over unchecked growth.
The math, says Lightspeed’s Arsham Memarzadeh, who paid that hefty $10 billion price earlier this year after previously missing out on Wiz, is simple: With cloud usage headed toward $1 trillion in global spending, there’s a growing opportunity for the companies promising to secure it—potentially a 5% cut. “They’re in a very prized neighborhood,” says one security-focused investment banker who requested anonymity to speak freely.
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