Nine months since birth, and Wiz raises $100M

Israeli startup Wiz, which develops cloud security technologies, announced the closing of a $100 million Series A funding round. The investment saw participation from leading VCs, such as Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, and Cyberstarts. The company’s co-founder Assaf Rappaport, from the Microsoft acquired Adallom founding team, also previously led the Seattle software giant’s Israeli R&D center, until he stepped down about a year ago.

Providing big picture insight for security teams

Wiz is a cloud security startup, founded by Microsoft Israel execs: Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik - all part of the Adallom team which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million. The company explains that they have developed a platform that targets complete enterprise visibility of all cloud-native applications, providing big picture insight into the state of its network and data security.

The company boldly claims that cloud security is broken. Today's cloud security suites are complex, fragmented and generate too many alerts for security teams. "My team couldn't believe how easy it was to get Wiz up and running," said Emily Heath, Chief Trust and Security Officer at Docusign. "The instant, out-of-the-box visibility, and value it provides make one of the best security tools I've seen in a long time."

"When our founding team was leading the Microsoft Cloud Security Group, we saw firsthand how security teams struggled with the complexity of existing approaches to securing the cloud," said Assaf Rappaport, CEO and co-founder of Wiz. "We knew that by embracing a cloud-native approach, we could make a product that is simple to deploy and scale, allowing security teams to focus on real risks. We're excited to partner with such an experienced and well-respected team of investors again as we look to accelerate our growth in 2021, and meet the market demand for an elegant cloud security platform that works."

Wiz's unique architecture allows for seamless scanning of the entire cloud environment across all compute types and cloud services for vulnerabilities, configuration, network, and identity issues without agents or sidecars. To this result, Wiz empowers CISOs with the whole security layout all in one place.

"When we first met the Wiz founding team in 2012 during the early days of Adallom, it was clear they were a passionate group with a deep understanding of the security space ," said Doug Leone, global managing partner at Sequoia Capital. "Eight years later, the team has only gotten stronger with the founding of Wiz. Their past experiences executing at scale and their hunger to build an enduring company will help Wiz lead the market with a new generation of cloud security tools. We're thrilled to partner again with this exceptional founding team."

Xsight Labs emerges from stealth with funding and a game-changing chip

After partially revealing itself through Intel’s VC arm’s announcement last May, Israeli startup Xsight Labs, a fabless semiconductor startup, is officially emerging from stealth mode with a new chip and $116 million in funding from Intel, Microsoft, Xilinx, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Atreides Management.

A chip to upgrade data-center traffic

The Israeli startup was founded in 2017 by three former EZchip (acquired by Mellanox in 2015 for $800 million) execs, including CEO Guy Koren, CTO Gal Malach and Switch GM Erez Shaizaf. The three who held executive positions at Mellanox, later quit to form Xsight Labs.

In addition to the combined experience of the trio, the company also has an ace up the sleeve in one of the initial investors and the man who has sold chip companies to Marvell, Amazon, and Intel for a combined total of $5.5 billion - Avigdor Willenz. Just last year, he sold Habana Labs to Intel for $2 billion.

Xsight Labs emerges from the startup shadows revealing a new product targeted for server farms - X1, the industry’s first and lowest-power 25.6T 32 x 800G and 12.8T 32 x 400G data center switch with 100G PAM4 SerDes. Xsight Labs also stated it has multiple products in development for the next generation of cloud service providers and hyperscale data center networks, enabling feature velocity and exponential growth in bandwidth, while lowering power and total cost of ownership.

As reported by the company, Xsight Labs goal is to provide server farms with the ability to implement AI or machine-learning chips, among other capabilities. Mostly due to the fact that these smart capabilities demand high network traffic.

“We are extremely proud of the strong legacy of our team, which has developed and productized multiple generations of cloud infrastructure products,” said Guy Koren, Co-Founder and CEO of Xsight Labs. “Building on this strong foundation, the team has successfully executed on a unique new data center switch architecture, delivering unmatched performance with remarkably low power, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Avigdor Willenz notes that “Xsight Labs has assembled a world-class engineering team, with the goal of enabling next-generation data center end-to-end interconnects that drive new paradigms of scale and efficiency.” Willenz further added that “the sampling of X1 is the first step towards realizing this ambitious vision, and I am extremely happy to be part of this journey with the team.”