Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak. The four founders possessed an extraordinary, decade-long history of technical collaboration: they had served together as elite cyber intelligence officers in the Israel Defense Forces' Unit 8200 and founded cloud security pioneer Adallom in 2012, which Microsoft acquired for $320 million in 2015. Following the acquisition, Rappaport was appointed Head of R&D for Microsoft Israel and led the Cloud Security team, while Costica, Reznik, and Luttwak served as principal security architects. During their five years running cloud security inside Microsoft, they observed an immense, systemic crisis: enterprise companies were moving to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud at breakneck speed, but the security tools available to protect them were antiquated relics of the on-premise server era. Security teams were forced to manually install heavy software 'agents' on every virtual machine—a process that took months, frequently crashed production applications, and overwhelmed engineers with tens of thousands of disconnected, low-priority alerts. In early 2020, the team walked away from Microsoft, reuniting in a small apartment to build Wiz with a radical thesis: what if cloud security required zero agents? By using cloud provider APIs to inspect virtual hard drive snapshots from the outside, Wiz could scan an entire enterprise cloud architecture in minutes without touching production servers. Combining this agentless approach with a graphical graph database that linked vulnerabilities to actual internet exposure, Wiz created a magical product demo that closed Fortune 100 enterprise accounts in single meetings. Scaling from $0 to $100M ARR in 18 months, Wiz shattered all previous software growth records.\n\nIn early 2020, four elite Israeli Unit 8200 commanders—Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—walked away from lucrative executive roles at Microsoft. They had already built cloud security pioneer Adallom and sold it to Microsoft for $320 million. But they saw that cloud security was broken: companies were drowning in thousands of meaningless alerts from sluggish software agents. The four friends made a vow: they would build 100% agentless security that connected in 15 minutes and showed CISOs the honest truth about their cloud risk. When Wiz deployed across Fortune 100 giants, CISOs were stunned by its toxic risk graph. And in July 2024, when Google offered an unprecedented $23 billion in cash to buy Wiz, Rappaport and his partners boldly walked away to build an independent software dynasty. That fearless chutzpah built Wiz into a $12B+ titan past $500M ARR, forever altering the destiny of enterprise cybersecurity.