AT A GLANCE

Wiz
GitPod
2020
Founded
2020
New York, New York
HQ
Remote (Germany origin)
$1.9 billion
Total Raised
$41 million
Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik
Founder
Sven Efftinge, Moritz Eysholdt, Johannes Landgraf, Christian Weichel
Cybersecurity
Type
Dev Tools
Acquired by Google ($32B)
Status
Renamed Ona (2025), acquired by OpenAI (2026)

FUNDING HISTORY

Wiz

Series A2020
$100M raised
Series B2021
$130M raised$1.7B val.
Series C2021
$250M raised$6.0B val.
Series D2023
$300M raised$10.0B val.
Series E2024
$1.0B raised$12.0B val.
Acquisition2026
$32.0B raised$32.0B val.

GitPod

Seed2020
$3M raised
Early-stage round2021
$13M raised
Series A2022
$25M raised

BUSINESS MODEL

Wiz

Wiz sells annual subscriptions based on the number of cloud workloads (virtual machines, containers, serverless functions) protected. Pricing scales with cloud consumption — as customers use more cloud, they pay Wiz more.

This aligns perfectly with the broader trend of growing cloud spend.

The agentless model is a key pricing advantage. Traditional security tools require installing software agents on every server, which creates deployment costs, performance overhead, and maintenance burden.

Wiz connects via API to cloud provider accounts and scans everything externally. Deployment takes minutes instead of months, which dramatically shortens the sales cycle.

ARR growth was record-breaking: $1 million within months of launch, $100 million in 18 months, $350 million by 2023, and reportedly over $500 million by 2024. No enterprise SaaS company has ever scaled this fast.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

HOW THEY STARTED

Wiz

The four Wiz co-founders — Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik — had already built and sold a cybersecurity company together. Their previous startup, Adallom, was a cloud security company that Microsoft acquired in 2015 for $320 million.

After the acquisition, all four worked at Microsoft leading the Cloud Security Group.

By 2020, they were ready to leave and build again. They saw a gap in cloud security: as companies rushed workloads to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, security tools hadn't kept pace.

Existing solutions required installing agents on every server and generated floods of alerts that security teams couldn't process. The cloud was a mess of misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and hidden vulnerabilities — and nobody had a clear picture of it all.

Wiz launched in January 2020 — literally weeks before COVID-19 shut the world down. Instead of slowing them, the pandemic accelerated their market.

Every company on Earth was rushing to the cloud, and Wiz's agentless approach meant customers could deploy it in minutes with zero infrastructure changes. Connect your cloud account, and Wiz scans everything — VMs, containers, serverless functions, databases, identity configurations — building a complete risk map.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

HOW THEY GREW

Wiz

Wiz grew through a combination of product excellence and founder credibility. The four co-founders had already sold a company to Microsoft and led cloud security there.

When they said "we built a better way," CISOs believed them because of the track record.

The product sold itself through demonstrations. Wiz's 15-minute deployment — connect your cloud account, see your risk map immediately — was the most effective sales tool.

Security vendors typically require weeks or months of setup. Wiz showed results in a single meeting.

Landing massive logos early created a cascade. Within two years, Wiz had 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers.

When one CISO at a major bank buys Wiz, every other bank CISO hears about it. Enterprise security is a trust-based market, and early customer logos created a self-reinforcing credibility loop.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

THE HARD PART

Wiz

The Google acquisition decision dominated 2024. Wiz turned down Google's $23 billion offer in July 2024, with Rappaport saying they wanted to pursue an IPO and build an independent company.

Then they accepted a $32 billion offer later — the largest cybersecurity acquisition in history. The deal raised questions about cloud neutrality: Wiz secures AWS, Azure, and GCP equally, but becoming owned by Google could make AWS and Azure customers nervous.

Before the acquisition, the competitive landscape was intensifying. Palo Alto Networks acquired cloud security startups aggressively.

CrowdStrike expanded from endpoint security into cloud. AWS, Azure, and Google all improved their native security tools.

Wiz's lead was real but competitors were closing in.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

THE PRODUCTS

Wiz

Wiz Cloud Security Platform — the core product that provides agentless visibility across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, exposed secrets, and identity risks.

Wiz Runtime Sensor — a lightweight agent (optional) that adds real-time threat detection to the agentless scanning foundation. Wiz Code — security scanning integrated into the developer pipeline, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production.

Wiz Defend — a cloud detection and response product that identifies and helps contain active threats in real time. Wiz Security Graph — a visual map of an organization's entire cloud environment showing how every resource connects and where attack paths exist.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

WHO BACKED THEM

Wiz

Sequoia Capital led early rounds and was the most prominent backer. Index Ventures, Insight Partners, and Greenoaks Capital participated in growth rounds.

Cyberstarts (an Israeli cyber-focused VC) was an early seed investor. Andreessen Horowitz invested in later rounds.

The final private valuation of $12 billion came in a 2024 funding round before the $32 billion Google acquisition.

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.

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