Wiz eyeing Dazz acquisition in deal worth hundreds of millions
Wiz eyeing Dazz acquisition in deal worth hundreds of millions
The cybersecurity giant is considering acquiring Israeli startup Dazz, which provides AI-powered cloud security remediation.
Cyber decacorn Wiz is exploring the acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity company Dazz, led by co-founder and CEO Merav Bahat. Dazz completed a $50 million fundraising round in July at an estimated valuation of $400 million, suggesting that a purchase price could be at least $500 million. One of the investors in both companies is Gili Raanan’s Cyberstarts. Calcalist has learned that Dazz received multiple acquisition offers due to its significant sales growth in recent quarters.
According to the company, it achieved a 400% increase in ARR between 2023 and 2024, while tripling its salesforce and expanding its footprint across all functions in the U.S., Europe, and Israel.
Dazz has raised $105 million to date from investors including Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts, Insight Partners, and Index Ventures. The company’s unified remediation platform provides visibility across all detection tools and environments, including code, clouds, applications, and infrastructure, and provides significant time savings for customers in researching security issues and reducing the Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR).
The company was founded by Bahat, former Deputy CEO at Microsoft’s Israel’s R&D Center. She left Microsoft at the end of 2020 after serving as General Manager in Microsoft's cloud security division. She co-founded the company with CTO Tomer Schwartz, who founded Microsoft's Security Response Center in Israel, and VP of R&D Yuval Ofir. Tomer was one of the first employees at Armis Security, and previously managed research at Adallom, established by the Wiz founders, which was sold to Microsoft. Ofir is the former VP of R&D at Claroty. Ofir also served as a commander in the elite 8200 unit, where he worked alongside Schwartz.
Wiz, one the largest private cybersecurity companies in the world, reached an estimated market valuation of $12 billion in its latest funding round and $20 billion in secondary transactions. A potential $23 billion acquisition by Google was called off in July, and this Dazz acquisition would mark another milestone in the growth of Wiz, which was founded by CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik.
The founding team has collaborated for over 20 years, including as leaders of Microsoft’s cloud security group, which acquired their previous venture, Adallom, for $320 million. Since its founding in 2020, Wiz has raised $1.9 billion, including $300 million in February 2023 at a valuation of $10 billion.
Wiz reached $100 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) within 18 months of launching its products and today is estimated to have sales exceeding $500 million.
