HOW WIZ WON BIG

A VETERAN TEAM, A SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL PRODUCT, AND A LASER-FOCUSED CEO ADDED UP TO A $32 BILLION EXIT—AND ONE OF THE BIGGEST TECH DEALS OF THE DECADE.

- BY MICHAL LEV-RAM

DOGGED SALESMAN CEO Assaf Rappaport (shown here with Star) is Wiz's go-to pitchman for corporate clients.

IN MARCH 2024, Sundar Pichai emailed Assaf Rappaport, expressing interest in his startup, Wiz. It was the kind of overture that, at least in Silicon Valley, often precedes serious acquisition talks.

Pichai's email went unanswered for months.

It wasn't that Rappaport, the cofounder and CEO of cloud-security startup Wiz, was avoiding the Google chief's overtures. Rather, Rappaport had managed to completely miss the message to begin with.

It was the spring of 2024, and Wiz had become one of the fastest-growing startups in tech history, hitting $350 million in annual recurring revenue in just four years. A $300 million Series D round had given Wiz a valuation of $10 billion, reportedly making it the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to hit that milestone that fast. Rappaport was jetting between Wiz's headquarters in New York City and his hometown of Tel Aviv, home to one of Wiz’s engineering hubs. In other words, the guy was busy.

It took until May for the entrepreneur to realize what he was missing. At a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, a contact close to both companies told Rappaport that Google wanted to talk to him—and that he might want to check his inbox. As the event wrapped, Rappaport and one of his cofounders, Yinon Costica, headed to Google's offices in Mountain View. There they met higher-ups including Thomas Kurian, head of Google's massive cloud division. And yes, Pichai was there, too.

Things moved fast from there. Less than a month later, Google offered $23 billion for Wiz—roughly double its valuation at the time.