In the world of technology, cybersecurity has become a major concern. Data breaches are not only still happening, but security companies are also in the news a lot because of them. One of the fastest-growing, Wiz, was the target of a $23 billion takeover offer from Google that was later withdrawn.
Recently, a notable fundraising round has been secured by a cybersecurity business that is coincidentally intimately linked to Wiz.
Dazz is an enterprise cloud service provider that specializes in vulnerability repair. It has raised $50 million in equity capital. Although the startup is not revealing its worth, those with knowledge of the business indicate that it is slightly less than $400 million after investments.
The startup is raising money during a really exciting period for cybersecurity. In addition to Wiz seemingly turning down a $23 billion takeover offer from Google, one of the largest companies in the space, publicly traded CrowdStrike, released a problematic update only a week ago, causing a significant disruption for its enormous customer base and upsetting millions of people worldwide.
Even while none of those stories directly address the most pressing cybersecurity problems that we currently face—breach, data leak, criminal activity-induced outages—they both highlight how important cybersecurity companies are to the industry right now.
Dazz, which works with larger businesses, says that its revenue has surged by more than 400% in the past year even though the company does not release revenue figures. It is said that the current investors Index Ventures, Cyberstarts, Greylock Partners, and Insight Partners are “leading” the round. Since its 2021 start, Dazz has generated around $110 million in total funds.
Although Dazz’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, the company has deep roots in Israel. Its CEO and co-founder, Merav Bahat, spent years working for Microsoft in their cloud security division, which was established when the company bought Adallom, the prior Wiz firm.
When Bahat left to found Dazz in 2020, she played a key role in growing Microsoft’s cloud security division to a $2.5 billion company. The current value of the subsidiary exceeds $20 billion.
Bahat learned two crucial lessons while working at Microsoft.
The first of these was a tight friendship with Wiz later on and with Adallom’s CEO, Assaf Rappaport. Bahat is a go-to dog sitter and unofficial second human family for Rappaport; they are both based in NYC and Tel Aviv. The two founders might even complete each other’s sentences when they are with other people. And Bahat was among Rappaport’s first investors while he was preparing to launch Wiz. (Yes, she would have benefited tremendously from the sale to Google.)
Another valuable skill Bahat acquired was a thorough comprehension of what aspects of cloud security are effective, ineffective, and in need of much more research and development. She co-founded Dazz with two other cybersecurity professionals, Yuval Ofir (VP R&D) and Tomer Schwartz (CTO), armed with this experience.
According to Bahat, all of his prospects and clients use a variety of cloud security platforms, including Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike. Nevertheless, she added, there is still room for improvement and a chance to concentrate particularly on remediation—the action taken once vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or breaches are found.
“We hear from [security teams] that no one has been able to resolve these issues about vulnerability, prioritization, and remediation.” She clarified that the number of issues that develop in a normal network contributes to the process’s complexity and manual nature.
The primary goals of all security solutions are to provide you with visibility, detection, and an understanding of the issues. “So much is off,” she remarked. “I work with some organizations that may have millions of vulnerabilities that are unresolved and unsettled.” She pointed out that one customer’s network had up to 1.2 billion vulnerabilities found in it.
Large security platforms are among the many additional participants in the remediation market. The technology that Dazz uses to aggregate reports of vulnerabilities found across various cloud architectures and environments appears to be its game-changer (it refers to this as “unified” remediation). Additionally, the business has developed an AI-driven automation layer that helps security teams better organize by prioritizing concerns and determining which vulnerabilities are close to active activity and which are dormant. After that, it assists in fixing such problems.
According to Bahat, remedial efforts in the past may have only addressed 10% of vulnerabilities—hopefully the most serious—but Dazz’s method can address 50% to 80% of vulnerabilities.
Companies like Wiz have undoubtedly profited from the current corporate tendency of obtaining IT from fewer “one-stop shop” suppliers. Nonetheless, there is still justification for point solutions for specific functions. Remedial work, according to Dazz and its backers, is one of such areas, particularly since the so-called single pane of glass can handle all of a company’s assets, whether they are on-premises or in the cloud.
