Who owns Wyze? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Wyze Labs is one of the more unusual ownership stories in consumer technology. It was built by people who left Amazon to sell smart-home cameras cheaper than Amazon itself, and it has stayed private and founder-led throughout. There is no ticker to look up and no parent company to name. Control sits with the four founders and a small group of venture funds.

That structure matters because Wyze sells hardware that lives inside people's homes. Cameras, doorbells, and locks generate sensitive data, and who controls the company shapes how that data is handled. Wyze has faced repeated security incidents, including one in 2024 that let thousands of customers briefly see footage from strangers' cameras. Those events put the spotlight on a private company that answers to its investors and founders rather than public shareholders.

This article breaks down who owns Wyze, how much has been raised, who sits in control, and why the ownership setup carries weight for a company whose products watch its customers' front doors.

Wyze Labs, Inc. was incorporated in 2017 and is based in Kirkland, Washington, in the Seattle metropolitan area. Its four co-founders, Yun Zhang, Dongsheng Song, Dave Crosby, and Elana Fishman, met while working at Amazon, a contrast to Wyze given how Amazon itself is owned as a widely held public company, before leaving to build affordable smart-home devices.

The company's first product, the Wyze Cam, launched in October 2017 at $19.99, far below the price of comparable indoor cameras at the time. That low-cost, direct-to-consumer model drove fast adoption. Wyze reported selling more than 1.5 million units of its first cameras within roughly a year of launch, and it later expanded into video doorbells, smart plugs, bulbs, sensors, locks, thermostats, and robot vacuums, paired with an optional Cam Plus cloud-storage subscription.

Wyze is private and does not publish audited financials. Its most recent officially reported valuation was roughly $100 million, set at the January 2019 Series A. The company has said it serves millions of households, and it has raised about $146 million in total venture funding.

Wyze is privately held. It has never completed an initial public offering, its shares do not trade on any exchange, and it is not a subsidiary of a larger corporation. Ownership is split between the founding team and the venture-capital firms that backed the company across its funding rounds. Because Wyze does not file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, precise equity percentages are not public.

The four co-founders retain significant ownership and operational control, but Wyze has not disclosed the exact size of any founder's stake. Yun Zhang, Dongsheng Song, Dave Crosby, and Elana Fishman started the company together in 2017, and all four have been described as co-founders throughout its history. As is common across broader startup funding patterns, each priced round likely diluted the founders' combined holdings, though they appear to have kept both board influence and executive roles. What is confirmed is that the founders still lead the company; what is not disclosed is the precise split among them or against investors.

Wyze has raised roughly $146 million across several rounds. The table below reflects the most widely reported figures. Round labels and the Series B valuation vary across trackers and were not all confirmed by the company.

Norwest Venture Partners led Wyze's first priced round, the $20 million Series A announced in early 2019, and became the company's most prominent early institutional backer. The round valued Wyze at roughly $100 million and funded its expansion beyond cameras.

Marcy Venture Partners, the venture firm co-founded by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter along with Jay Brown and Larry Marcus, led the $110 million Series B in 2021 and participated in an earlier extension round. The round was positioned to fund Wyze's push into artificial-intelligence camera features such as person, vehicle, package, and pet detection.

Additional reported backers across Wyze's rounds include iSeed Ventures, an early seed investor, along with Eastern Bell Venture Capital, American Family Ventures, and Kensington Capital Partners. Wyze does not publish a full cap table, so the relative size of each firm's stake is not public.

Wyze has given no public indication of an imminent initial public offering. It remains a private, founder-led company funded by venture capital. Secondary-market platforms list estimated share prices for existing Wyze holders, but those are third-party marks rather than a company-set valuation, and they reflect private transactions rather than a public listing. Anyone trying to gauge a private company's worth from the outside has to work from these partial figures.

Yun Zhang is Wyze's chief executive officer and co-founder. He previously worked at Amazon and is the public face of the company's leadership.

Dongsheng Song co-founded Wyze and has been associated with product leadership. Dave Crosby co-founded the company and has led marketing and communications. Elana Fishman is the fourth co-founder. All four came out of Amazon, which shaped Wyze's operating style and its focus on low prices and direct sales.

Wyze does not publish the full composition of its board of directors. Given the company's funding history, its lead investors, Norwest Venture Partners and Marcy Venture Partners, would typically hold or have held board representation tied to their rounds, but Wyze has not confirmed a current board roster publicly. The confirmed picture is a founder-run executive team; the board's exact makeup is inferred from standard venture practice rather than disclosed.

In December 2019, an unsecured database left roughly 2.4 million Wyze users' data exposed for several weeks. Security researchers found the open Elasticsearch cluster, and Wyze attributed the incident to an employee error that misconfigured server security while data was being moved. Exposed fields reportedly included email addresses, Wi-Fi network names, camera nicknames and models, and tokens linking devices to services such as Amazon Alexa. Wyze said passwords and financial data were not exposed and forced a sign-out of all users in response.

In March 2022, security firm Bitdefender published findings on serious vulnerabilities in Wyze cameras, including flaws that could let attackers bypass login, run their own code, or access footage stored on SD cards. Bitdefender said it had first reported the issues to Wyze in 2019. Wyze patched newer models over time but determined that the original Wyze Cam v1, last sold in 2018, could not support the fixes, and it warned customers to stop using that model. Critics, including Consumer Reports, faulted Wyze for taking about three years to fully address the flaws and for not clearly disclosing the risk to customers sooner.

In September 2023, some Wyze users reported seeing camera feeds that belonged to other accounts. Wyze attributed the problem to a web-caching issue. A similar and larger incident followed in February 2024, when about 13,000 users received thumbnail images from cameras that were not theirs, and roughly 1,500 users tapped to enlarge them. Wyze said the February event followed an outage tied to its cloud partner and a third-party caching library that mixed up device and user identifiers. The company said it was expanding its security engineering in response.

These incidents highlight a governance question that ownership sits at the center of. Because Wyze is private and founder-controlled, decisions about security investment, disclosure timing, and data handling are made internally rather than under the scrutiny that comes with public-company reporting. Larger rivals often formalize these exposures in a company-wide risk register reviewed by an independent board. For a business whose products record inside customers' homes, the concentration of control raises the stakes on how seriously ownership treats security.

Wyze's private, founder-led structure gives its leadership room to compete on price without answering to public-market pressure for quarterly margins. That freedom helped Wyze undercut established rivals such as Ring, whose control now sits with Amazon, and reach millions of households with sub-$30 cameras. The trade-off is limited transparency. Outsiders cannot see audited financials, a full cap table, or a confirmed board roster, so assessing the company's health means relying on reported funding figures and third-party estimates rather than filings.

For investors, the ownership setup is a bet on a hardware business with thin margins and a subscription upsell, a very different engine from how Amazon makes money across cloud computing and advertising. Norwest Venture Partners and Marcy Venture Partners hold minority stakes acquired across priced rounds, and their returns depend on an eventual sale or IPO that Wyze has not signaled. Secondary-market estimates that placed the company below its total funding raised in 2026 suggest those returns are far from guaranteed, though such marks are not company-confirmed and should be treated with caution.

For customers, ownership shapes accountability. A private company decides on its own how quickly to patch vulnerabilities, how much to disclose, and how much to spend on security. Wyze's repeated incidents, from the 2019 exposure to the 2024 feed mix-up, show how much rides on those internal choices when there is no public shareholder base demanding answers.

The result is a company whose independence is both its strength and its risk. Founder control has kept Wyze focused on affordability and fast product expansion. It has also concentrated responsibility for privacy and security in a small, private ownership group whose decisions are hard to see from the outside.

Yun Zhang is the chief executive officer of Wyze. He co-founded the company in 2017 with Dongsheng Song, Dave Crosby, and Elana Fishman, and previously worked at Amazon.

No. Wyze is a private company. It has not held an initial public offering, its shares do not trade on any stock exchange, and it has no market cap. It is not owned by a parent corporation.

Wyze was founded in 2017 by four former Amazon employees: Yun Zhang, Dongsheng Song, Dave Crosby, and Elana Fishman. They left Amazon to build low-cost smart-home devices, starting with the $19.99 Wyze Cam.

The founders retain significant ownership, and the largest institutional backers are its lead venture investors, Norwest Venture Partners, which led the 2019 Series A, and Marcy Venture Partners, which led the 2021 Series B. Other reported investors include iSeed Ventures, Eastern Bell Venture Capital, American Family Ventures, and Kensington Capital Partners. Wyze does not publish exact ownership percentages.

Wyze has raised roughly $146 million in total venture funding. Reported rounds include a $20 million Series A in 2019, an extension of about $15 million in 2020, and a $110 million Series B in 2021. Its last officially reported valuation was about $100 million at the 2019 Series A; the Series B valuation was not officially disclosed.