{"id":14781,"date":"2023-04-26T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T09:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insightpartners.com\/?p=14781"},"modified":"2025-03-18T09:09:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T13:09:39","slug":"wiz-cofounders-turned-longstanding-friendship-into-revolutionary-cybersecurity-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insightpartners.com\/ideas\/wiz-cofounders-turned-longstanding-friendship-into-revolutionary-cybersecurity-company\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Wiz cofounders turned a longstanding friendship into a revolutionary cybersecurity company"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: In March 2025, it was announced Google has agreed to buy Wiz<\/a> for $32B in cash, marking Alphabet’s largest-ever acquisition.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The <\/span>leaders <\/span>of cloud security company Wiz were close friends long before they became <\/span>cofounders.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ami Luttwak, Assaf Rappaport, <\/span>Yinon Costiva, and Roy Reznik <\/span>originally met <\/span>as teenagers back <\/span>in 2001<\/span> when they served together in t<\/span>he Israeli army.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was 17 when we met,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cIt was 22 years ago. That\u2019s part of our story. This is not the first startup we\u2019re building together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think part of the magic of that relationship is how different we all are,\u201d says Rappaport. “Each cofounder has a distinct personality, and it allows us to bring out the best in each other.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

They grew up together, came to understand the world together, and ultimately<\/span> managed to evolve their<\/span> strong <\/span>and distinctive <\/span>bond<\/span> from friends to business partners.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Adallom acquisition and Microsoft years<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s a bond that has lasted throughout a number of companies. In 2012, the foursome created Adallom, a cloud access security broker. Three rounds of funding led to $50 million<\/a> of investment. Adallom wasn\u2019t an overnight success story. The company gave customers <\/span><\/span><\/span>visibility<\/span><\/span><\/span> and control over <\/span><\/span><\/span>access to their applications<\/span><\/span><\/span> and data, but<\/span><\/span><\/span> it took years for the market to develop, catching up to what the founding team had recognized as an opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The market did eventually catch up, and Microsoft <\/span>bought the company in 2015<\/span><\/a>. The foursome joined the tech giant to lead cloud security. There, they got a crash course in building for the enormous scale that Microsoft <\/span>required<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe came to Microsoft with the Adallom product,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cPart of the transition was to remove maybe 75% of the features, but to make it scalable.\u201d They integrated <\/span>Adallom<\/span> into Microsoft and <\/span>ult<\/span><\/span><\/span>imately deployed<\/span> the product to 100 million users.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe transition to Microsoft taught us how to view startups in a different way,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a feature fight. It was: \u2018How do I build a scalable product that, from an engineering perspective and also from a usability perspective, anyone can use? And how do I do that without adding complexity in deployment and usage because you\u2019re aiming for huge scale.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Creating the “Switzerland of cloud security”<\/h2>\n

The Adallom team was Microsoft\u2019s biggest cybersecurity acquisition at the time and a key part of building a new business within the company. Luttwak recalls the four years at Microsoft as being \u201camazing,\u201d not just for Adallom and the cloud security product but for seeing how a huge organization can scale a completely new business.<\/span><\/p>\n

“When we started, Microsoft didn\u2019t have any security sales,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cWhen we finished, it was around $1 billion a year.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When we started, Microsoft didn\u2019t have any security sales. When we finished, it was around $1 billion a year.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, the four cofounders got restless and saw an opportunity to build products <\/span><\/span><\/span>that could function <\/span><\/span><\/span>across many cloud platforms<\/span><\/span><\/span>. \u201cOne of the things that spurred our departure was the prospect of providing a solution for cloud security teams that extended beyond Azure and truly supported multi-cloud environments,\u201d says Rappaport. \u201cYou might say what we envisioned was the \u2018Switzerland\u2019 of cloud security.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

They wanted to go it alone once more. \u201cWe decided that it’s time to start something completely new, to try to disrupt an existing market,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cAnd that’s when we decided it’s time to leave and really try our luck and create Wiz.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wiz is born<\/h2>\n

The decision to give up comfortable jobs in a large company like Microsoft is a tricky choice at any time, but the stakes felt even higher for the four longstanding friends. \u201cWhen you start a company, it’s quite a frightening experience because no one likes to fail,\u201d Luttwak says. \u201cBut of course, the second time, there are higher expectations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The founders knew that people would be comparing the trajectory of their new company to the success of Adallom \u2013 and anything other than enormous growth would be seen as a disappointment.<\/span><\/p>\n

But they <\/span>didn\u2019t<\/span> let <\/span><\/span><\/span>high expectations<\/span> dissuade them from their big idea.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While at Mic<\/span>rosoft, they had identified a hole in the<\/span> cloud security market<\/span>: <\/span>Unlike with on-premise <\/span>cybersecurity, t<\/span>here wasn\u2019t a way for security teams to view all their cloud servers in a <\/span>\u201csingle pane of glass.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe market existed for 15 years,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cAlthough you had multiple products, none of them actually solved the problem. That happens sometimes: you have products, you have a market, security teams buy the product. But they don\u2019t actually solve the problem. And that\u2019s where opportunity arises.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

You have products, you have a market, security teams buy the product. But they don’t actually solve the problem. And that’s where opportunity arises.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The team launched Wiz in January 2020<\/span> to rethink how cloud <\/span>security teams could understand <\/span>their infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors<\/span>:<\/span> \u201cAfter talking with a lot of teams, we came to the realization that what\u2019s broken is not a specific feature or functionality,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cWhat is broken in cloud security is that the entire operating model of how you do security needs to change.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They convinced customers and financial backers that they could be that change. \u201cWe worked with our existing investors, and we got a very big investment from day one \u2013 around $20 million,\u201d says Luttwak. The high investment was a double-edged sword. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty scary,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cYou want to succeed. You believe in yourself. But it\u2019s still a startup, you know. There\u2019s a lot of expectations from you.\u201d\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Building for scale<\/h2>\n

Wiz <\/span>ultimately bec<\/span><\/span><\/span>ame<\/span> one of the fastest growing security startups of all time, and the team attributes that, in part, to the cofounders\u2019 dynamics and their experience building both startups and within Microsoft. <\/span><\/span><\/span>\u201cI feel this team now has multiple superpowers,\u201d says Luttwak. \u201cWe had gone through a startup phase and the Microsoft phase.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The group had built what Luttwak calls \u201cthe scalable startup.\u201d It\u2019s a different model from how the team operated at Adallom: usually, in a startup, the founders are focused on whatever the customer wants. \u201cBut in a scalable startup, you think like Microsoft: this is going to be used for 10x, 100x the load we have today because we\u2019re going to succeed. So let\u2019s build in a scalable manner.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“An unbelievable journey”<\/h2>\n

The Series A funding from Insight Partners and others <\/span>in December 2020 <\/span><\/a>has allowed Wiz to scale in a way that has defied expectations. It was aided by many of the team being long-tenured colleagues of the founding team. Just as the four cofounders had sustained connections, a surprisingly large number of Wiz\u2019s engineers are people the founding team encountered 15 years ago at Adallom.<\/span><\/p>\n

That inherited institutional knowledge, alongside nailing the product-market fit, has helped Wiz to grow to what it is today following its launch out of stealth. \u201cIt’s been an unbelievable journey,\u201d says Luttwak, \u201cand a lot of it is because of our customers, right? Customers using the product is the best way to get more usage.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Word of mouth, combined with the fact that cloud security isn\u2019t an issue going away any time soon, has helped pave a path to continued success for Wiz, reckons Luttwak. The company hit a <\/span>$100 million ARR within only 18 months<\/span><\/a> of reaching $1 million, showing the scale of growth in the sector.<\/span><\/p>\n

The company hit a <\/span>$100 million ARR within only 18 months<\/span> of reaching $1 million<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWhat’s beautiful in the problem we’re trying to solve for customers is that it just keeps growing,\u201d he says. \u201cThe cloud gets bigger. There are more technologies in the cloud. The complexity of the cloud just grows.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

And Wiz plans to help companies navigate that complicated world. \u201cWe want,\u201d says Luttwak, \u201cto help companies get clarity in that complexity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Scale up your career:\u00a0<\/strong>See all open roles at\u00a0Wiz on the Insight Partners job board.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

The investor POV<\/h2>\n

\"Teddie<\/p>\n

How one call with the team behind Wiz changed Teddie Wardi\u2019s mind on the company.<\/em><\/h3>\n

Tech investment is a connections-based business. Instinct can play as significant a role in whether a deal comes to fruition as careful research and diligence, as the story of Insight Partners\u2019 investment in Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz shows.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ecosystem in Israel in startups overall, but especially in cybersecurity, is pretty tight-knit,\u201d says Teddie Wardi, Insight Partners managing director. Insight had previously invested heavily in the Israeli cybersecurity sector. So it was only natural that Wardi would hear about what the founding team behind Wiz was cooking up.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe kept hearing stuff about the team, but we had never met them,\u201d says Wardi. When Wiz raised a seed round early in 2020, they bubbled back up to Wardi\u2019s desk in late 2020, seeking Series A funding. At that point, Wardi decided to get in touch with the four cofounders behind Wiz. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a short window of time getting to know them and partnering up,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was almost like one phone call where we decided these guys were up to something pretty brilliant, and we needed to partner with them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

“Timing matters a lot”<\/h2>\n

The hour-long phone call helped convince Wardi that he should support the startup at the start of its journey. \u201cInvestment decisions are always a composite of things,\u201d he says. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of them is understanding the context in which you\u2019re making an investment. Insight Partners has a storied history of investing in cybersecurity companies<\/a>. They knew the problems with cloud security and how startups could help solve those issues. \u201cWiz was there at exactly the right time \u2013 and timing matters a lot,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWiz was there at exactly the right time \u2013 and timing matters a lot”<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The technology behind the company was also scrutinized. \u201cThey had this initial technological hook called agentless scanning,\u201d says Wardi. \u201cIt allows them to plug into the customers\u2019 environments in a very fast and cloud-native way, which means the product is quick to try out and deploy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team and the tech<\/h2>\n

Then investors looked at the team \u2013 and Wiz\u2019s cofounding team. They had together founded a prior company, Adallom, a security company that was acquired by Microsoft in 2015, where the founding team ended up working for a number of years. \u201cThey had success in the past selling their startup,\u201d says Wardi. \u201cThey had done well in a big corporate environment and proven they can also achieve large scale things and work with large enterprises.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But even if a company is in the right place, at the right time, with the right product from the right founding team, making that choice to buy in can be tricky. So a phone call was still needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wardi prides himself on approaching those conversations with a technological mindset. He focuses specifically on products over just people. \u201cFor us, even in early stage investing, it\u2019s important that the team has built out a first iteration of the product,\u201d says Wardi, \u201cand there\u2019s some evidence that they\u2019re selling.\u201d That evidence? Wiz entered the phone call with Insight after having secured two major multinational enterprise customers for its cloud security services.<\/p>\n

The full-stack founder<\/h2>\n

However, there were still doubts in the back of Wardi\u2019s mind. Many businesses come to pitch themselves to Insight, and the company\u2019s experts have learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff. \u201cBesides telling the story about why they started the company and what was their advantage, I poked [Wiz cofounder Assaf Rappaport] on the technological approach,\u201d he says. \u201c<\/span>What has he built so far? What is he going to build in the next year?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The goal was to understand whether the promise of the future was hot air or if the team could do what they said they would. Wardi was blown away by the level of detail and clarity of vision within the responses. \u201cAssaf rolled with the punches very well,\u201d he says. \u201cHe knew every detail, to the extent that a CEO wouldn\u2019t even have to. It impressed us that he\u2019s a full-stack founder. He knew the ins and outs of this thing. And that gave us confidence in him as a leader.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

“They broke the mold”<\/h2>\n

Wardi came out of the call far more confident in the idea of investing in Wiz than he entered it. Indeed, he almost didn\u2019t take the call \u2014 the company was raising a very large round of funding for the stage they were at in their development, which made Wardi naturally skeptical of whether the company had been overhyped.<\/p>\n

However, when Rappaport started getting into the nitty gritty details of how the technology actually works, how quickly they can deploy it within a customer, and why it was transformative compared to all the other solutions already out there on the market, he was convinced.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a tremendous story from a growth perspective,\u201d says Wardi. \u201cThey\u2019ve accomplished much more than what they said they would and what we expected them to do. They broke the mold.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Interviewed by Chris Stokel-Walker<\/a> for Insight Partners.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: In March 2025, it was announced Google has agreed to buy Wiz for $32B in cash, marking Alphabet’s largest-ever acquisition. The leaders of cloud security company Wiz were close friends long before they became cofounders.\u00a0\u00a0 Ami Luttwak, Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costiva, and Roy Reznik originally met as teenagers back in 2001 when they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":14798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-software-leaders","topic-stories","domain-cybersecurity"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow the Wiz cofounders turned a longstanding friendship into a revolutionary cybersecurity company | Insight Partners<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.insightpartners.com\/ideas\/wiz-cofounders-turned-longstanding-friendship-into-revolutionary-cybersecurity-company\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How the Wiz cofounders turned a longstanding friendship into a revolutionary cybersecurity company\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor’s note: In March 2025, it was announced Google has agreed to buy Wiz for $32B in cash, marking Alphabet’s largest-ever acquisition. 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