Compare / Wiz vs Pinterest
WIZ
Four Israeli cybersecurity veterans who previously sold their company to Microsoft for $320 million got togeth…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Wiz
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.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
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.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
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.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
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.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
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.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
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.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.