Gee Wiz: The extraordinary rise of the world’s fastest-growing company

A boot camp and pandemic shaped a startup that’s now close to the biggest takeover in Google’s 25 year history, writes Anthony Cuthbertson

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Just four years after it was founded, US cyber security startup Wiz has become the world’s fastest growing software company in history, and is now reportedly set to be acquired by Google in a record-breaking deal. But the company’s story has been more than two decades in the making.

It began on the first day of bootcamp for the Israeli army in 2001, when co-founders Assaf Rappaport, Roy Reznik, Ami Luttwak and Yinon Costica met.

The four friends were eventually recruited to join the elite cyber intelligence division Unit 8200, known as the ‘Israeli NSA’, which has cultivated some of the industry’s leading figures in recent years.

After leaving the Israel Defence Force, the friends launched their first venture, Adallom, in 2012. Three years later it was sold for $320 million to Microsoft, where they continued to work on the firm’s cloud computing platform Azure. Five years later, they decided to leave the tech giant to set about building what they hoped would be a generational software company, which could one day rival the scale of the world’s biggest companies.

Launched in January 2020 as a fully remote company, Wiz was able to easily navigate the sudden global shift in working conditions that resulted from the Covid lockdowns. The timing of the pandemic was also fortunate because it forced other companies to look for cloud-based security solutions rather than use on-site setups.

Speaking to Index Ventures earlier this year, Mr Rappaport said these factors meant that March 2020 was “the best time in history to start a cyber security company in the cloud”.

Being an exclusively cloud-based company gave Wiz a competitive advantage over its rivals, while an innovative interface simplified how customers are able to view their cyber security operations.

The unique approach provided visual displays that use graphs and charts to illustrate a company’s entire cloud security architecture, making it straightforward to identify threats and potential weaknesses. This in itself also helped to streamline the security teams of these companies.

The startup was quickly able to attract some of the world’s largest businesses, with customers ranging from video game developer EA to banking giant Morgan Stanley.

Key to the company’s success has been the relationship between the co-founders. In a 2023 Forbes cover story on Rappaport, the entrepreneur explained that the “magic of the relationship” was in their differences. “Each co-founder has a distinct personality,” he said. “It allows us to bring out the best in each other.”

Various other profiles of Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport over the years have portrayed him as a quiet but relentless character driven by an obsession to create the world’s next great software company.

An article in March described Rappaport as “one of the most ambitious entrepreneurs of his generation”, with former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz claiming his “superpower” was that he is “steeped in humility”.

This ambition, humility and luck, combined with the foursome’s dynamic, helped push Wiz to a $12 billion valuation during a billion-dollar funding round in May. The newly reported deal with Google values Wizz at $23 billion, which would make it the biggest acquisition in the search giant’s 25 year history.