Wiz, probably the most talked-about names on the planet of cybersecurity, is making a big acquisition to develop its product attain in cloud safety, significantly with builders. It’s shopping for Dazz, a specialist in safety remediation and danger administration. Sources inform us the deal is valued at $450 million in a mixture of money and shares.
It is a bump on the startup’s final funding spherical. In July, we reported that Dazz raised $50 million on a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture administration — the 2 areas the place Dazz focuses — are key companies within the cybersecurity market that Wiz was not masking in addition to it wished to.
“Dazz is the chief on this market, with the very best expertise and the very best clients, and it’s a fantastic tradition match,” stated Assaf Rappaport, Wiz’s CEO, in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to serving to to grasp and resolve vulnerabilities, offers form to how an enterprise truly tackles the various vulnerability alerts they could obtain from throughout their networks. Posture administration is a extra preemptive product: it offers a company a greater understanding of the dimensions, form and performance of its community from the angle to construct higher safety companies round that.
Dazz will proceed to function as a separate entity whereas it’s built-in into the bigger Wiz stack. Wiz has constructed a reputation for itself as a “one-stop-shop”, and Rappaport stated that an built-in providing will proceed to be a significant a part of that.
He believes that’s in distinction with how loads of different SaaS companies have been constructed. Within the safety business, there are, Rappaport stated, “loads of Frankenstein mashups, the place firms are prioritizing revenues over constructing one expertise stack that really works as a platform.” Arguably, integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in different areas of enterprise IT.
An extended and shut partnership
Wiz and Dazz already had a detailed relationship going into this deal. Merav Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP R&D, respectively) — labored carefully with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his earlier startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to discovered Wiz together with his previous Adallom co-founders CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was considered one of its first traders. Equally, when Bahat began Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in that.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are additionally shut mates, and he or she was a second household to Mika, Rappaport’s beloved canine who was referred to as Wiz’s Chief Canine Officer (full with LinkedIn profile). Because the deal went down, the 2 confronted two very unhappy developments: each Bahat’s mom and Mika handed away.
“We’re hoping for a brand new chapter of positivity right here,” Bahat stated. The cycle of life certainly continues onward.
Rumors about this acquisition began to floor earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that this was after they had began to speak critically.
However that’s not the one M&A chatter that has concerned Wiz. Earlier this yr, Google tried to purchase Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a big cybersecurity enterprise. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been Google’s greatest, partly as a result of Rappaport stated he believed Wiz might turn into a good greater firm by itself phrases. And is what it’s aiming for with this deal.
The acquisition is considered one of a run for Wiz, which earlier this yr stuffed its coffers with $1 billion expressly for the aim of M&A (it’s raised almost $2 billion in complete, and we’ve heard that one other spherical will shut in a number of extra weeks). Different offers have included shopping for Gem Safety for $350 million, however Dazz is its greatest acquisition but.
There could also be extra M&A to return. “We consider that subsequent yr goes to be a yr of acquisitions for us,” Rappaport stated.
Builders want extra assist
Talking to TC, Luttwak stated that one of many priorities for Wiz proper now could be to construct out extra instruments for builders, addressing what they should get their jobs achieved.
Enterprises have made important investments into cloud companies to hurry up how they work and to make their IT extra versatile, however that shift has include a considerably modified safety profile for these organizations: Community and information architectures are extra sophisticated, and assault surfaces are bigger, creating alternatives for malicious hackers to search out methods to breach these techniques. AI is making all of that considerably tougher when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s additionally a possibility: a brand new era of instruments to defend us are all constructed on AI.)
Wiz’s distinctive promoting level has been an all-in-one method. Ingesting information from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and different cloud environments, Wiz scans purposes, information and community processes for safety danger elements and gives a spread of detailed views to its customers to grasp the place these dangers exist, with greater than a dozen merchandise masking areas like code safety, container setting safety and provide chain safety, in addition to a quantity companion integrations for these working with different suppliers (or to include capabilities that Wiz doesn’t supply instantly).
Certainly, Wiz provided a level of remediation to assist prioritise and repair points, however as Luttwak stated, Dazz’s product is simply higher.
“We now have a platform that may truly provide you with a 360-degree view of danger, masking infrastructure and utility,” he stated. “Dazz is the chief in assault floor posture administration, the flexibility to gather vulnerability indicators from the appliance layer throughout the stack, and construct probably the most superb context that lets you observe it again to the engineers, to assist with remediation.”
On the facet of Dazz, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million on a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing a robust level answer and this week, she stated that Q3 was “superb.”
“However the momentum out there is one thing that ignites these type of offers,” she stated. Dazz had been getting acquisition affords from different firms, too, she confirmed. “If you concentrate on the purchasers and the joint clients that we’ve with Wiz, it is smart for them to have it in a single platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s opponents are nonetheless going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz an knowledgeable in assault floor administration, simply yesterday introduced a $300 million increase on a $5 billion valuation (confirming a scoop of ours). However what’s it going to do with that cash? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it’s now at $500 million in annual recurring revenues (it’s aiming for $1B in ARR within the subsequent yr), and counts over 45% of the Fortune 100 as clients. Dazz stated that ARR was within the tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} and it’s at present rising at 500% on a buyer base of about 100 organizations.
