The first half of 2021 has been incredible for Wiz. Fueled by an additional $250M in funding ($350M total) from Sequoia, Index Ventures, Insight, Salesforce, Blackstone, Advent, Greenoaks, and Aglaé Wiz has grown at a blistering pace, going from 25 employees at the start of the year to 120 today, and we’ve invested in accelerating our growth from here. The number of hires is far less important than the quality and I can objectively say that Wiz continues to bring the best and brightest minds in the cloud security space and beyond onto our team. The growth in our customer base, which now includes well over 10% of the Fortune 500 in addition to many of the world’s fastest growing SaaS providers, has been even faster.
One of the unique things about Wiz is that we’ve been international from day one, originally selling our product in both the United States and Israel. Today we have customers in many countries and I’m delighted to announce that we've established London as Wiz's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) sales headquarters, affirming our current and growing presence in the region.
The region and London office will be led by Rob Finn, who led the sales organizations in EMEA for the likes of Puppet, Twistlock and Prisma Cloud. The EMEA headquarters in London serves as an account management, advisory services, and business development center, providing European-based clients with access to Wiz's revolutionary cloud infrastructure security platform. In addition, Wiz is building a team of cloud experts in Holland, Sweden, Germany and France, with a number of openings for account executives, sales leaders and solution & delivery engineers.
"The growth of the European tech sector has been unprecedented over the past few years. Cloud adoption has been one of the driving forces behind record levels of investments in enterprise software startups, and corporate spending on tech. As the go-to cloud security partner for some of the world's leading brands, Wiz is in a strong position to become a leader in Europe." Shardul Shah, Partner, Index Ventures.
Cloud adoption only continues to accelerate in the region as the pandemic has accelerated many organisations cloud-first digital transformation strategies. The large cloud providers continue to expand their data centre presence in EMEA, with AWS investing in Africa & Italy, Azure investing in Austria, Sweden, Qatar, Spain & Israel, and GCP investing in Qatar, France, Italy Spain. Like them, we very clearly see companies in EMEA investing in cloud infrastructure, and we also see a tremendous and growing demand from customers for the requisite security controls around required by the cloud. That being said, the risks in the cloud are only becoming more complex, as seen by the Wiz research teams recent Cosmos DB discovery and the DNS and AWS vulnerability discoveries presented at BlackHat 2021 (it’s worth noting that Wiz’s research team will also be presenting at BlackHat Europe in London, November 8-11, 2021).
It's been an amazing journey since we founded the company in Feb 2020. Since we started, our goal has been to deliver security that accelerates business - security that allows our customers to use cloud to move faster, be more agile, and seize their market opportunity. I'm exceptionally proud of the work we’ve done to help our customers and the team we've assembled in Israel, US and Europe. If you’d like to see where we’re growing next, check out https://www.wiz.io/careers.
