The funding was led by major names of Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and comes after Wiz executives signaled an intensified push with channel partners.

Wiz on Tuesday announced $1 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation as the four-year-old company sees surging growth in the cloud and AI security markets.

The massive funding was led by major names of Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It comes after top company executives told CRN that Wiz is pursuing an intensified push with channel partners for its next stage of growth.

[Related: Wiz Aims For ‘Huge’ Channel Push With Exec Hires, Partner Recruitment]

The $12 billion valuation is up from the company’s previous valuation of $10 billion from its early 2023 funding round, which had already stood as the highest among cybersecurity unicorns. Wiz has now raised a total of $1.9 billion in funding since its launch in 2020.

Wiz has been generating surging growth throughout its four-year history — initially thanks to its cloud security posture management (CSPM) offering, which rapidly delivers improved cloud visibility and security. The company last year surpassed $350 million in annual recurring revenue and has expanded its technology to become a broad Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) provider spanning security for cloud, code, data and AI.

Earlier this year, Wiz hired former Zscaler COO Dali Rajic as president and COO as it works toward going public.

“We want to be a public company. So that’s our overall goal,” Wiz Co-Founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said in a recent interview with CRN. “I would say when we’ve reached probably $1 billion in ARR, that would be when we should be thinking more seriously about IPO.”

In the news release announcing the new funding Tuesday, Wiz set the move will bolster the continued expansion of its CNAPP while helping the company with “setting its sights on an eventual IPO.”

In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, the funding round was also co-led by Thrive Capital and included contributions from Greylock and Wellington Management. Existing investors that took part in the round included Index Ventures, Cyberstarts, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

In the news release, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Sarah Wang called Wiz a “cloud security pioneer” that has shown “remarkable agility, adaptability and a keen understanding of market dynamics” — ultimately making the company a “power player” in cybersecurity.

The funding also comes as Wiz has embarked on its first acquisition spree by snapping up two startups, Gem Security and Raftt, since December.

Partner Push

Meanwhile, Rappaport and Rajic told CRN in February that Wiz is making its channel efforts a top priority in 2024 after a series of executive hires that seek to enable faster partner-driven growth in cloud and AI security at the vendor.

The Wiz executives said that the time is ideal for the company to accelerate its efforts with partners given the surging demand for security tools that can protect cloud environments and the use of generative AI applications.

“In cybersecurity partners are super, super important in the success of a company. So we’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into. I think there is so much more we can do,” Rappaport said.

“We’re going to put much more resources into that to make sure we are aligned with the partners to fulfill the huge demand that we’re seeing in the market,” he told CRN previously. “And that’s going to be a first priority for us in the next few years.”

Rajic said previously that while the success at Wiz has already been remarkable, he believes there’s a “massive” opportunity to work with a broader set of channel partners as part of driving continued growth.

The funding announced Tuesday also came in the midst of RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco, where Wiz has a prominent presence including on the show floor (pictured above).

Recent major additions to the Wiz cloud and AI security platform have included native AI security capabilities with its AI-SPM (AI security posture management) offering. Wiz’s AI-SPM aims to protect the use of AI tools during the software development process, while the vendor has also extended the technology to support the OpenAI API Platform.