Wiz acquires cloud cybersecurity startup Gem Security for reported $350M

Well-funded cybersecurity provider Wiz Inc. has bought Gem Security Inc., the developer of a platform for protecting cloud environments from hacking.

The companies didn’t disclose the acquisition price in their announcement of the deal today. Fortune reported that the transaction values Gem at $350 million, more than ten times the $34 million it has raised from investors. The company counts the venture capital arms of IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. among its backers.

“It is the year of security consolidation, and that is our path forward,” Wiz co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Assaf Rappaport wrote in a blog post. “Tool sprawl, silos, and visibility gaps have spurred organizations to actively push to consolidate vendors. To own the market, Wiz must solve this pain, while continuing to stretch the boundaries of innovation and make the complex simple — at speed.”

Founded in 2020, Wiz provides a platform that enterprises use to scan their cloud environments for cybersecurity issues. The software finds code vulnerabilities, datasets that are accessible to more users than they should be and other weak points. Additionally, Wiz can spot when hackers attempt to use those weak points to launch a cyberattack.

A year and a half after launching its platform, the company disclosed that its annual recurring revenue had reached $100 million. A few weeks ago, Wiz announced that this number has since more than tripled to $350 million. The software maker is backed by $900 million in funding and counts over 40% of Fortune 100 companies as customers.

Gem launched in 2022, about two years after Wiz. It provides a cybersecurity platform that likewise focuses on helping enterprises protect their cloud environments from hackers. But the platform offers a different set of features than Wiz, including tools designed to ease the data management tasks involved in cyberattack detection.

The major public cloud operators provide customers with a significant amount of telemetry about their deployments. This telemetry includes, among other items, data about potential cybersecurity issues. But collecting and analyzing this information in a reliable manner can be challenging, which often leads to visibility gaps for cybersecurity teams.

Gem says that its platform automatically identifies cybersecurity visibility gaps, ranks them by severity and generates suggestions on how to collect more detailed data. Moreover, it promises to ease the task of analyzing that data.

Many cybersecurity tools require users to configure detection rules, software workflows that determine what types of events should be flagged as malicious. An administrator might, for example, configure a workflow that raises the alarm if there’s an attempt to delete a sensitive database instance. Cybersecurity teams must set up upwards of hundreds of such rules to account for the large number of tactics used by hackers.

Gem ships its platform with hundreds of prepackaged rules to save time for customers. When the software detects malicious activity, it automatically creates a timeline that describes what actions the hackers took and in what order. Administrators can review that timeline to identify ways of improving their company’s cybersecurity posture.

The acquisition of Gem is the likely first of several Wiz will announce in 2024, Fortune reported. The company might be planning to finance those acquisitions with the $800 million in new funding it’s said to be seeking from investors. Last month, the Financial Times reported that the round could value Wiz at more than $10 billion.

Image: Wiz