I’m Darwin Salazar, Head of Growth and Marketing at Monad and former Detection Engineer in big tech. Each week, I dig through all the major headlines to bring you the latest security product innovation and industry news. Subscribe below for weekly updates!

Google just acquired Wiz for $32B, 5 years after its founding.

If you haven’t been watching closely, you may be asking yourself “How on earth did they achieve that?”. It’s an unprecedented, historic feat that will be talked about and studied for decades.

The X-Factor: Wiz’s Go-To-Market Strategy

I’d argue that they’ve had a greater Go-To-Market run than any other B2B company in recent history, except for maybe Salesforce. As a former competitor to Wiz, a current tech partner through Monad, a market analyst with TCP, and a friend to several Wizards, I’ve had an up-close look at their meteoric rise.

A Decoding of Wiz’s Growth and Marketing Tactics

In this series, I’ll try to decode the exact growth and marketing tactics behind Wiz’s historic exit. In this installment, we’ll dissect their journey from finding Product-Market Fit (PMF) to how they nailed branding that set them apart in a hyper-competitive segment with well-established incumbents.

Perspective

• Wiz achieved $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in August 2022, just 18 months after launch, making it the fastest software company to reach this milestone at the time.
• By May 2023, ARR reached $200M, and by February 2024, it was $350M, with a target of $1B ARR and a future Initial Public Offering (IPO).
• In July 2024, rumors swirled that Google had extended a $23B buyout offer, which was confirmed after Assaf sent a company-wide email stating they’ve turned the offer down to pursue an IPO.
• Their historic ascent ultimately culminated in a $32B acquisition by Google on March 17th, 2025.

Time Machine

Let’s rewind back to 2020 before Wiz was founded. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) had been a product category for 5+ years. The term ‘CNAPP’ didn’t exist. Companies like Palo Alto Networks, Aqua, Sysdig, and Checkpoint controlled the cloud security space.

Decoding Wiz’s Success

So how did Wiz come in, kick the doors down, and capture enough market share to go from 0 to $32B in just 5 years? How did they dethrone incumbents and become the security darling of the world?

Pain Points and Key Ingredients

Of course, in retrospect, Wiz had many key ingredients working in their favor:

1. Strong, proven founding team (Adallom founders + Microsoft Cloud Security Leadership)
2. Great, sticky product
3. Solving deeply felt pain points
4. Timing (founded just as the world goes remote due to COVID-19 + cloud boom)
5. Legendary investors + network effects (Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Index Ventures etc.)
6. Lots of early funding ($480M+ within a year of emerging from stealth)
7. Relentless execution

Decoding the PMF Journey

None of this happens without PMF, so let’s start there. What made Wiz different in a sea of 30+ cloud security tools is that they transformed a fragmented cloud security market of point solutions (CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, IaC scanning etc.) into a unified, user-friendly platform called Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).

Key Takeaways

Wiz’s unified platform paired with their agentless approach made it super simple and fast to get value. Most cloud workload protection platforms required deploying and maintaining agents on workloads which added additional overhead. Wiz’s agentless approach removed this friction.

1. Wiz placed heavy emphasis on contextualization of security issues which led to their highly successful Wiz Security Graph and ‘Toxic Combinations’ visualizations.
2. Wiz’s unified and contextualized solution allowed security teams to easily onboard, prioritize the most important stuff, and gain a holistic view of potential impact with much less overhead than traditional cloud security tools.

CMO Success Factors

Key takeaways below:

• Stealth Days – Wiz was initially founded as “Beyond Networks” with the intent to build a network security product. 10-15 calls a day with security leaders led to realization that network security was not a burning pain point.
• The founder’s and investor’s deep networks certainly played a key role in the 10-15 calls a day.
• The Magical “Pull” – A strong indicator that you’re headed in the right direction is when feedback goes from “Cool idea, not sure if we have a need for it right now” to “When can we start a PoV/PoC?”.
• Early Sales – Founding team closed ‘a couple million’ in ARR before bringing on their first salesperson.
• Major lesson here is that if the founding team can’t sell the product repeatably end-to-end, it’s wishful thinking that bringing in a salesperson would be able to crack the PMF code for you.
• Product messaging – Must be crystal clear. Abstract it to a level where beginners or outsiders can understand the problem you’re solving and how. Ditch the acronyms. Have a ‘dummy explanation’.
• CMO Success Factors
• Trust from founding team
• Deep connection to the product
• Deep connection to the market
• Experimentation – “Let’s try everything and try to make noise” approach played a huge role in their marketing success.

Branding

Wiz’s branding starts with its name, short for “Wizard” and indicating magic. In an industry where fear, loss, and urgency are top of their customer’s mind, Wiz designed a fun, light-hearted brand with magic as the central theme.

Key Branding Takeaways

Emotional Connection First – Be extremely thoughtful in the feelings you want your brand to evoke. Prioritize inspiring hope over fear.

1. Color Palette – Use colors and designs to signal reliability in a high-stakes industry.
2. Unique Brand Theme – Great brands have themes.
3. Playful Yet Professional – Wiz’s branding is very playful and indicates that the company likes to have fun.
4. Branding Consistency – Wiz ensured consistency across website, product UI, conference booths, swag and everything in between.

Conclusion

There is so much to be learned from Wiz’s acquisition. It’s a masterclass in category creation and proving that a bold GTM strategy, a sticky product, and a magical brand can turn a startup into an industry darling (and $32B) in just five years.

Success Leaves Clues

How can the rest of us apply Wiz’s playbook to redefine our own respective categories?

For More

There’s a ton of fantastic analysis dissecting the deal end-to-end and what it may mean for our industry.