By Mathis Lefevre —
After serving as a cyber security intelligence officer in the Israeli military for nine years, Assaf Rappaport, founder of Wiz, created a $32B company in just five years. No other company has netted such a high price at so fast a pace.
In 2024, Rappaport received a $23B offer from Google, which he promptly rejected. Rappaport said to his employees, “Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.”
Rappaport’s experience with codebreaking and signal intelligence while in the Israeli military led him to his founding of Wiz, which broke ground on Cloud uploaded data, rising cyber threats and AI.
In 2001, Rappaport was selected for Talpiot, a branch in the Israeli military for recruits with great leadership and academic potential. Graduating from Talpiot, he got into Israel Defense Force’s elite the secretive and highly classified Unit 81, an Intelligence Corps tech unit providing cutting-edge technology to Israeli soldiers.
Later he joined the IDF’s elite Unit 8200, which does cutting edge work in signals intelligence, surveillance, codebreaking and cyber operations.
Rappaport described Unit 8200 as “the best school of entrepreneurship.”
“That experience showed me the impact you can make when you combine great talent with amazing technology,” Rappaport says.
Israel’s cyber security units, because they must fend off existential threats to Israel, produce the best minds in the technology world today. The subtext to this story is that you don’t want to wage war against Israel.
Before making his (financial) killing with Wiz, Rappaport previously sold a cloud access security broker Adallom, to Microsoft in July 2015 for approximately $320 million.
Wiz solved Google’s Cloud problem. The search engine’s cloud security was seen as third place behind Amazon’s web services and Microsoft’s Azure. The Wiz acquisition made Google superior.
Rappaport lives in a simple apartment in Tel Aviv and takes public transport. He wears jeans, T-shirts and sneakers to work and addresses employees as equals.
“His superpower is that despite how confident and successful he’s been at a young age, he’s steeped in humility,” said former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz about Rappaport.
Sources: Michael Sikand on YouTube, Software Analyst on Substack, Index Ventures, Calcalistech, Reuters and others.
