“We met on a bus to the IDF Introduction Center in July 2001 and have been working together ever since,” recalls Yinon Costica, one of the four founders and Vice President of Product at Wiz, who was 17 at the time.

The remaining names that make up Wiz include CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, and VP of R&D Roy Reznik.

According to Calcalistech , the four served in the IDF’s intelligence units 8200 and 81. After pursuing different paths post-IDF, they reunited and started their first security company, Adallom, in 2012. In 2015, they sold Adallom to Microsoft for $320 million and took charge of the giant’s R&D center in Israel. In 2020, they left the American company to found the cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz. Last week, Google shocked the world when it announced it would spend $32 billion to buy Wiz.

According to Luttwak, it was their different personalities that helped them write an amazing entrepreneurial journey, from Adallom to Wiz. They grew up together, understood each other's worlds, and developed a friendship into loyal business partners.

wiz founders
The four Wiz founders (from left to right): Vice President of Product Yinon Costica, CEO Assaf Rappaport, Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak and Vice President of R&D Roy Reznik. Photo: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

After joining Microsoft, he said, about 75 percent of Adallom’s features were stripped away, but it was made more scalable. Eventually, the product was deployed to 100 million users. The process itself taught him how to look at startups differently: how to build a scalable product from both a technical and a user perspective, and how to do it without making it too complex to deploy and use.

Luttwak described his four years at Microsoft as “fantastic,” as the team witnessed how a large company like Microsoft could expand into a completely new business area.

“When we started, Microsoft had no revenue from security. When we left, they were making about $1 billion a year,” he said.

Ami Luttwak, Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costiva, and Roy Reznik didn’t rest and immediately started developing products that could work across multiple cloud platforms. According to Rappaport, they saw an opportunity for a solution that went beyond Microsoft Azure and truly supported multi-cloud environments.

“We decided it was time to start something completely new and try to disrupt an existing market. That's when we left and took a chance with Wiz,” Luttwak recalls.

Leaving a secure, well-paying job at a large company like Microsoft is a risky choice. For four friends of 22 years, starting a business is a scary experience because no one wants to fail. Especially when starting a company for the second time, the expectations are higher. If it doesn't grow as fast as Adallom, it will be a big disappointment.

But they didn’t let the high expectations discourage them. While at Microsoft, they discovered a gap in the cloud security market: unlike on-premises security, security teams couldn’t easily see all of the cloud servers.

Wiz was launched in January 2020 to help cloud security teams rethink how they handle infrastructure across multiple service providers. After talking to multiple teams, they realized the entire paradigm around security needs needed to change.

They convinced customers and investors and received their first $20 million investment. Ultimately, Wiz became one of the fastest growing security startups of all time thanks to its two-time startup experience and time at Microsoft.

Wiz's operating model is different from Adallom's. While at Adallom, the founders only focus on what customers want, at Wiz, they "think like Microsoft", thinking about the prospect of the product being used 10 times, 100 times more than it is now.

With the help of a large number of engineers who worked at Adallom, the journey has been “unbelievable,” according to Luttwak. Wiz reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just 18 months and became the fastest company in history to reach $500 million in ARR by August 2024.

In particular, Luttwak says the problem they want to help customers solve is one that keeps growing: the cloud is getting bigger, more technology-intensive, and more complex. Wiz wants to help them navigate that complex environment.