Highlights:

  • Agents are software programs that operate in a company’s cloud environment and gather information about potential threats.
  • As businesses release new applications and update existing ones, cloud environments’ settings frequently change.

Wiz Inc., a cybersecurity startup, has raised USD 300 million from investors to maintain its current business momentum. Wiz Inc. passed USD 100 million in annualized recurring revenue last year.

Recently, Wiz revealed the Series D funding round. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital Partners, and Index Ventures all worked together to lead the round. At its current valuation of USD 10 billion, the company is worth USD 4 billion more than it did following its previous funding round in late 2021.

Wiz, based in New York, offers a software platform that aids businesses in finding security holes and malicious activity in their cloud environments. More than 35% of the Fortune 100 are among the startup’s customer base, according to the company. Last August, it began operations in 2020 and hit USD 100 million in annualized recurring revenue.

Recently, Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, posted a blog entry, “The rapid growth of Wiz is a measure of the value we deliver to our customers. By partnering closely with each one of our customers, we learned the complexity as well as the business and operational challenges they face. We’ve learned how important is the partnership between security and development teams to build cloud securely.”

Agents are software programs that operate in a company’s cloud environment and gather information about potential threats. According to Wiz, its platform uses no agents to collect cybersecurity data, making installation easier. Customers are said to be able to deploy the platform in just a few minutes.

Many businesses use infrastructure-as-code scripts, short programs that can define settings automatically to save administrators time configuring their cloud environments. When such scripts might include vulnerable setting definitions, Wiz’s platform can identify them. For instance, the platform can determine whether network security rules in a cloud environment are incorrectly configured.

It also detects various other security flaws. It can identify user accounts that have more system access than they need. Such accounts may be compromised by hackers and used to launch cyberattacks if they are not fixed.

As businesses release new applications and update existing ones, cloud environments’ settings frequently change. Vulnerabilities might appear whenever settings in a cloud environment are altered. According to Wiz, its platform constantly scans for new vulnerabilities and offers automated remediation tools to patch them.

In addition to vulnerable code and malicious activity, the platform can identify insecure configuration settings. Contextual information is provided in addition to malicious actions like unauthorized login attempts being flagged. Wiz can show which program or user did an unauthorized action and which systems were impacted.

Over the past few quarters, Wiz has significantly increased its investments in engineering. It released tools in 2022 for spotting malicious behavior, weak software containers, and insecurely stored corporate data.

Wiz intends to open three new offices in Austin, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., with the recently received money and continue improving its platform. To support the growth initiative, it will add to its 650-person workforce.