Wiz

Liquid AI

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.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

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.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

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.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

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.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

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.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

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.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.