Wiz

Magic 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.

Magic AI

Magic is building an AI that works like a software engineer, not a chatbot. The goal is a model you can hand a whole code base and a task, and it writes, reviews, and debugs like a teammate.

Their edge is memory. In 2024 they showed off LTM-2-mini, a model with a 100 million token context window.

To put that in perspective, that is about 10 million lines of code the model can look at in one shot, by far the biggest of any model at the time. The plan is to sell this as an AI coworker to companies that write a lot of software.

As of the 2024 rounds, the product was still not for sale.

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.

Magic AI

Eric Steinberger and Sebastian De Ro started Magic in 2022. Steinberger is an AI researcher who became convinced that the missing piece for a true AI software engineer was memory.

Chatbots forget what you told them a few thousand words ago. He wanted a model that could read your entire code base and remember all of it.

They raised a small seed in 2022, then a $23 million Series A in early 2023 led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG. From day one the pitch was not a chatbot.

It was an AI colleague that could handle real engineering work.

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.

Magic AI

Magic's strategy is research first, product later, which is both unusual and expensive. Instead of shipping an app and iterating in public, they raised huge sums to chase a technical breakthrough in model memory.

The headline move was the 100 million token context claim, which got the whole AI world talking. They also cut a deal with Google Cloud in 2024 to build two supercomputers, called Magic-G4 and Magic-G5, using NVIDIA chips, to train bigger models.

Star backers like Eric Schmidt served as validation. The bet is that if the tech is far enough ahead, the product and the customers follow.

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.

Magic AI

Magic has raised close to half a billion dollars and, years in, still has no product the public can buy. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

A giant context window is a great demo, but rivals like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Cognition's Devin already have real users and revenue. Magic has to prove that more memory actually makes a smarter engineer, not just a bigger number on a slide.

And it has to do that while burning enormous sums on compute against competitors who are already shipping. The clock and the cash both keep running.

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.

Magic AI

The centerpiece is Magic's LTM, or Long-Term Memory, model family. In 2024 they unveiled LTM-2-mini, a model with a 100 million token context window, pitched as the key to an AI that can understand an entire code base at once.

The broader product is an AI software engineer, or coworker, that can write and change code across a whole project. The company also announced Magic-G4 and Magic-G5, two supercomputers built with Google Cloud and NVIDIA to train these models.

Much of it is still research rather than a shipping product.

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.

Magic AI

Magic's backers are a murderers' row of AI insiders. It started with a $5 million seed round in 2022 and a $23 million Series A in early 2023 led by Alphabet's CapitalG.

Then in February 2024 came a $117 million round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, two of the most connected investors in AI. The blowout was August 2024.

Magic raised $320 million with checks from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, CapitalG again, Atlassian, Jane Street, Sequoia, and Elad Gil. That pushed total funding to around $465 million, all for a company still building toward its first sellable product.