$100M ARR in 18 months: Wiz becomes the fastest-growing software company ever

Just two years since its launch, Wiz protects hundreds of the world’s leading organizations by enabling them to build faster and more securely in the cloud

5 min read

When we started Wiz just over two years ago, we set out to help security teams solve the biggest problem they’ve encountered in decades—reducing cloud risk. We’ve come a long way in a short time, with record funding and valuation, leading investors, hallmark customers, rapid product innovation, and company growth that has brought us to where we are today.

I’m proud to share the latest defining moment in our company’s history: Wiz has achieved $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR). What’s more, we’ve scaled from $1M ARR to $100M ARR in 18 months, making Wiz the fastest software company to achieve this feat.

Reimagining cloud security

While breaking records is always nice, our revenue is simply a measure of the value we’re delivering to customers. That’s what makes me most proud: our customers are amazing, and they are why we do what we do. We protect the world’s largest and fastest growing organizations, including more than 25 percent of the Fortune 100. Companies like Avery Dennison, BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, Costco, Chipotle, EA, LVMH, Mars, Salesforce, Slack, and hundreds more trust us to help them rapidly identify and remove critical cloud risks.

When we first launched Wiz, we set out to design a product with the world’s leading enterprises in mind, and all the complexity and operational considerations their environments present. This is a high bar to meet for any startup. With Wiz, companies are developing a new maturity level in their cloud environments by improving security, increasing visibility, and driving agility.

Why Wiz

Cloud security did not start with Wiz. There’s been a robust industry long before we started our company. But cloud security solutions were complex, fragmented, and generated too many alerts to manage and act upon. Security teams wasted hours chasing alerts across a jumble of disconnected, isolated tools, manually correlating them to try to ascertain real risk. Agent-based security products created friction to deploy and maintain, and left gaps in coverage. Developers and security teams had differing views on the risks in their environment.

Wiz has introduced a new approach, one that enables the business, allows organizations to embrace the cloud securely while reducing risk, connects rather than deploys, covers the full stack, and can be operationalized immediately. Wiz can be rolled out in minutes via an agentless, API-centered approach to seamlessly scan workloads and give organizations full visibility of their cloud environment.

Our customers have seen the benefits first-hand. Erik Hart, CISO at Cushman & Wakefield and his team, began seeing actionable information within an hour of setup:

Wiz was really the first platform we saw where getting visibility across our entire environment was a one and done set up. The setup is dynamic so as items come and go in our subscriptions, we do not have to change anything. This allows our cloud team to be responsive to the business while giving security the oversight they need. We have now standardized to Wiz across our environment.

At the heart of our product lies the Wiz Security Graph, which is a game changer for cloud security. Rather than a long list of contextless alerts, Wiz identifies, correlates, and prioritizes risk across all layers – network, identity, secrets, workloads – and then puts it on the graph. This provides context that both cloud builders and cloud defenders need to focus on risk that matters. We identify different attack vectors and toxic combinations that represent critical risks better than any other technology in the market.

The Wiz Security Graph displays toxic combinations and includes breach detection insights

Omer Singer, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy at data cloud company Snowflake, recently shared how Wiz, which is a Powered by Snowflake partner, helps his organization stay secure in a multi-cloud environment:

Snowflake's Data Cloud was built from the ground up for the cloud, so cloud security is essential for us. Wiz plays a critical role in our security program, providing visibility and context for multiple teams across all clouds where Snowflake operates. For us, having a reliable and consistent cloud security posture enables innovating securely for thousands of customers.

When Log4shell hit late last year, we helped organizations such as Bridgewater immediately identify all vulnerable instances and prioritize them by risk. Organizations like FOX use Wiz to democratize security across their organization, making it usable for both developers and security teams alike and breaking down the barriers between teams.

Our pace of innovation is also unmatched. In the past quarter, Wiz expanded its capabilities from breach prevention to detection, and was the first to give organizations visibility into the paths attackers can take across cloud environments to break into critical databases. Wiz also expanded its coverage to both Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud, giving customers the broadest cloud coverage across all major cloud platforms.

Attracting world-class talent, expanding our board and leadership team

Each of our employees chooses to work for Wiz instead of the other amazing options available to them. It’s hard to believe that last year we started with only 40 employees. Now, we’re over 400, with plans to hire hundreds more by the end of the year to accommodate a customer base that’s growing just as quickly. We recently opened our New York headquarters to help make room for our growing footprint. We also established our employee presence in Europe and Asia-Pacific to support our burgeoning global customer base.

To fulfill our vision of reimagining cloud security, we’ve also brought on top tech and security executives to help lead Wiz into its next stage of growth.

I’m happy to share that security luminary and longtime CISO Emily Heath has joined our board of directors; Anthony Belfiore, a security veteran and former CSO at Aon and CISO at JPMorgan, has joined Wiz as Chief Security Officer; Ryan Kazanciyan, formerly a security leader at Meta and Chief Technology Officer at Tanium, has taken the helm of our cybersecurity program as CISO; and Ryan Carlson, who drove Okta’s marketing engine as it rose to the top of the identity market, has come onboard as Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer.

The path ahead

We’re celebrating with our team, but not resting on our laurels. This is just another step towards becoming the critical security platform to enable organizations to transform and evolve using the power of the cloud.

Wiz has scaled from $1M ARR to $100M ARR in 18 months (February 2021 to approximately July 2022). Previously, the fastest to accomplish this feat was Deel, which announced that it went from $1M ARR to $100M ARR in 20 months.

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