Wiz (founded in 2020) announced a new VC funding round of $1 billion at a post-money valuation of $12 billion. Wiz has cumulatively raised $1.8 billion in venture capital, is generating over $350 million in annual recurring revenue, and is on an upward trajectory toward a likely IPO in 2025. This signals high investor confidence in cloud security (specifically, cloud security posture management), agent-based and agentless cloud workload protection (CWP), container security, and infrastructure-as-code scanning.
Wiz’s investors include an impressive list of tier-one VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. This could potentially create product development tensions and challenges with aligning these investors’ long-term interests and strategic ideas, so tracking Wiz’s execution of its roadmap will be essential.
As we previously blogged, Wiz’s acquisition of Gem Security shows how a strategy of targeted acquisitions combined with organic growth can satisfy customer requirements in a rapidly expanding market such as cloud security. Around the same time of Wiz’s announcement of its latest VC funding, rumors were swirling that Wiz was considering purchasing a head-on competitor, Lacework, for a fraction of Lacework’s last valuation; that deal appears to have fallen through, however. While Lacework has augmentative capabilities to Wiz’s platform (such as agent-based CWP), Lacework’s offering overlaps heavily with Wiz product capabilities, so the proposed combination was not as strategic.
Wiz’s recent revenue growth and capital raised point to both an IPO exit strategy as well as continued high enterprise demand and investor enthusiasm for all things related to cloud security.
