Who owns Wiz? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Wiz went from a standing start in 2020 to a $32 billion sale in under six years, one of the fastest and richest runs in software history. For most of that time the question of who owned Wiz had a clean answer: its four founders and a tight group of venture investors. That changed in March 2026, when Google closed the largest deal it has ever made.

The ownership story is worth understanding because it captures how modern cloud infrastructure gets consolidated. Wiz never went public. It scaled revenue faster than almost any company on record, stayed private through five funding rounds, and then sold itself whole to one of the three companies that dominate cloud computing. The cap table that built Wiz produced some of the largest venture returns of the decade.

This piece breaks down who owned Wiz through each stage, from the founders and their early backers to the institutional investors who cashed out, and what changed when Alphabet took control.

Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik. The four had previously founded Adallom, a cloud security startup that Microsoft bought in 2015, after which the team ran Microsoft's cloud security group before leaving to start again.

The company is incorporated in the United States and headquartered in New York City, with a large share of its research and engineering based in Israel. Wiz sells a cloud-native application protection platform, software that scans a company's cloud environment across providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to find security risks. It charges enterprises on a subscription basis tied to the workloads they run.

Wiz grew at record speed. It passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue about 18 months after launch, which it described as the fastest any software company had reached that mark. ARR reached roughly $350 million by the end of 2023 and crossed $500 million in mid-2024, up around 103% year over year. By the time Google's purchase closed, Wiz was reported to be near or above $1 billion in ARR. Its last independent private valuation was $12 billion, set in May 2024, before it agreed to the $32 billion sale.

Wiz was a privately held company for its entire independent life. It never listed shares and raised all of its capital from venture and growth investors. As of March 11, 2026, Wiz is a wholly owned part of Alphabet, acquired through Google. It is no longer independent, and its equity is held by its new parent rather than by outside shareholders. You can size a deal like this against public comparisons with a business valuation calculator.

The four cofounders held a large combined stake through the sale. Reporting around the deal indicated that the founders together owned roughly 40% of Wiz, split about evenly, an unusually high level of founder ownership for a company that raised nearly $2 billion. That is possible because Wiz raised large rounds at rapidly rising valuations, which limited dilution at each step. Rappaport, Luttwak, Costica, and Reznik also reportedly donated about 1% of the company to a charitable foundation, a stake worth around $320 million at the deal price. Exact individual holdings were never publicly filed, since Wiz stayed private.

Wiz raised across a seed and five priced rounds, moving from a $1.7 billion valuation to $12 billion in roughly three years. The main rounds are below.

Across these rounds Wiz raised about $1.9 billion in total. Salesforce Ventures, Greylock Partners, Wellington Management, and individuals including Bernard Arnault and Howard Schultz also joined at various stages.

Sequoia Capital backed Wiz from the Series A and was one of its largest shareholders. Reporting tied to the sale estimated Sequoia's return at more than $3 billion, over 25 times its invested capital.

Index Ventures was an early lead and reportedly held around 12% of Wiz, a stake valued at more than $3.8 billion at the deal price, one of the single largest investor positions.

Insight Partners joined early and reportedly held about 8%, worth roughly $2.7 billion at exit.

Cyberstarts, an Israeli seed fund, made the earliest bet. Its initial investment of about $6.4 million was reported to be worth around $1.3 billion at the sale, a return near 200 times.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Greenoaks led or co-led the later rounds. Salesforce Ventures, the venture arm of Salesforce, invested as a strategic backer.

Wiz spent 2024 preparing to stay independent. It turned down a reported $23 billion offer from Google that summer and said it wanted to reach $1 billion in ARR and pursue an initial public offering. The fast-growing startup instead accepted a higher bid: on March 18, 2025, Google and Wiz announced a $32 billion all-cash deal. It closed on March 11, 2026, after clearing regulatory review.

Assaf Rappaport is the cofounder and CEO of Wiz and continues to lead it inside Google Cloud. Ami Luttwak serves as chief technology officer, Yinon Costica leads product, and Roy Reznik leads engineering. The four have worked together across two companies and were the controlling shareholders of Wiz before the sale.

While Wiz was private, its board included representatives of its largest investors, including Sequoia, Index Ventures, and Insight Partners, alongside the founders. That structure ended at closing. Wiz now reports up through Google Cloud, run by CEO Thomas Kurian, and ultimately sits under Alphabet, the holding company led by CEO Sundar Pichai. Control of Wiz has shifted from a founder-and-venture board to a division inside a public technology giant.

A $32 billion purchase by one of the world's largest cloud providers drew close antitrust scrutiny. The deal was reviewed in the United States and Europe over the year between announcement and close. The European Commission cleared it in early 2026, and the transaction closed in March 2026 after passing regulatory review, including in the United States. Wiz's platform works across competing clouds, and regulators examined whether Google could favor its own cloud or restrict rivals' access. The parties structured the agreement with a large reported breakup fee, a sign of how seriously both sides treated closing risk.

Wiz built its business partly on being neutral, scanning workloads across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud alike. Its sale to Google raised questions among customers and competitors about whether a tool owned by one hyperscaler stays fully neutral toward the others. Google has said Wiz will keep serving all major clouds. How that plays out matters to enterprises that adopted Wiz precisely because it was independent. Mapping those trade-offs is the kind of exercise a competitive analysis template is built for.

Wiz's founders are Israeli, and much of its engineering sits in Israel. That gives the company exposure to regional instability and to the politics around technology built there. It has not been the subject of a specific regulatory action on this basis, but the concentration of talent and operations in one region is a standing risk for a business now embedded in Google's global security offering.

Ownership determines who captures the value Wiz created, and the sale rewrote that answer. For nearly six years the upside belonged to four founders and a short list of venture firms. When Google closed the deal, that value converted to cash: billions for the founders, more than $3 billion for Sequoia, multibillion-dollar returns for Index and Insight, and a roughly 200-times return for the seed fund Cyberstarts. Few venture outcomes reach that scale.

For Google, owning Wiz is a bet on security as a pillar of its cloud business. Google Cloud is the smallest of the three major clouds, and buying the leading multicloud security platform is a way to differentiate and to win enterprise and government customers. The price, larger than any deal Google has done, signals how central security has become to how Google makes money from cloud. The strategic logic runs through the parent company's broader cloud ambitions.

For customers, the change in ownership is the live question. Many chose Wiz because it was independent of any single cloud. Under Google, they are trusting that a hyperscaler-owned tool will keep treating rival clouds as equals. Google's commitment to keep Wiz multicloud is central to retaining those accounts.

The deal also closes off the IPO path Wiz once planned. Instead of becoming an independent public company, Wiz became a division of a trillion-dollar firm. That trades the chance at standalone scale for the resources and reach of Google, and it concentrates one more piece of critical cloud infrastructure inside a handful of dominant players.

As of March 11, 2026, Wiz is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Google completed its acquisition of Wiz on that date, and Wiz now operates as part of Google Cloud while keeping its own brand.

Assaf Rappaport is the cofounder and CEO of Wiz. He led the company as an independent business and continues to run it inside Google Cloud following the acquisition.

No. Wiz was never publicly traded. It stayed private through five funding rounds and had planned an eventual IPO, but it was acquired by Google before listing. Its equity is now held by Alphabet, which is publicly traded under the tickers GOOGL and GOOG.

Wiz was founded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik. The same four had earlier founded Adallom, which Microsoft acquired in 2015.

Before the acquisition, the four founders held a large combined stake, reported at roughly 40%. The largest institutional investors included Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Cyberstarts, along with Greenoaks, Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, and Thrive Capital.

Google paid about $32 billion in an all-cash deal, the largest acquisition in its history. Wiz had reportedly rejected an earlier $23 billion offer in 2024 before agreeing to the higher price in March 2025.