An only child in Israel
Assaf Rappaport was born in Israel on 28 August 1983. He was an only child, and after his parents separated when he was young he was raised by his mother, Tzipi. It was a modest upbringing, and he has kept a close bond with her: years later, when he was appointed to run Microsoft’s research centre in Israel, her first question, as the Israeli business daily Calcalist told the story, was whether the job came with a car.
He grew up in an Israel that was turning itself into one of the world’s great centres of technology. He would earn a bachelor’s degree in computer science, physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later a master’s degree in computer science from the Technion, Israel’s institute of technology in Haifa.
Talpiot and the bus to the induction centre
Rappaport began his compulsory military service in 2001. He was selected for Talpiot, the Israel Defense Forces’ elite programme that gives a small number of gifted recruits an intensive academic and technological education before placing them in research and development roles. He went on to serve in Unit 81, a secretive technology unit of the Intelligence Corps, and rose to the rank of captain in Unit 8200, the corps’ signals intelligence and cyber unit, which has produced many of Israel’s technology founders.
The most important thing that happened to him in the army, though, may have happened on his first day. On the bus to the induction centre in July 2001 he met Roy Reznik, Ami Luttwak and Yinon Costica. The four would become friends, and over the next two decades they would build two companies together as equal partners.
Adallom: the last line of defence
After leaving the army Rappaport spent about two years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. In 2012 he reunited with Luttwak and Reznik to found Adallom. The name came from the Hebrew phrase ad halom, “up to here”, which the founders took to mean the last line of defence.
The company was built around an insight that was new at the time. Businesses were moving their email, documents and customer records into cloud software such as Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Google’s office tools, and the services themselves were generally secure. What was not secure was the way people used them: stolen passwords, careless sharing, accounts taken over by attackers. Adallom watched how employees used these applications, much as a credit-card company watches for unusual transactions, and flagged suspicious behaviour in close to real time. In 2013 its researchers discovered and reported a flaw in Office 365 that could let attackers hijack users’ identities and steal their email and documents; Microsoft fixed it in a security update that December.
In July 2015 Microsoft bought Adallom for about $320 million. Its product became Microsoft Cloud App Security, now Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and so went on protecting the cloud accounts of organisations around the world.
Inside Microsoft
Rappaport and his partners joined Microsoft with the acquisition. There they helped build security into Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and learned what it took to make software work at enormous scale. At around thirty-four, Rappaport was appointed head of Microsoft’s Israel Research and Development Center, which employed some 1,500 people, while also leading the company’s cloud security group.
He has called those years wonderful and said that leaving was not easy. But from inside one of the world’s largest cloud providers he could see a growing problem. Companies were moving more and more of their computing into the cloud, often across several providers at once, and individual teams were choosing their own tools. The result was sprawling, fast-changing systems that even their owners could not fully see, and security teams struggling to keep up.
Wiz: seeing the whole cloud
In January 2020, Rappaport left Microsoft and founded a new company with Luttwak, Reznik and Costica. It began under the name Beyond Networks, focused on cloud network security, but conversations with corporate security chiefs persuaded the founders that the real need was broader, and the company became Wiz. Rappaport became chief executive. Because the company launched just as the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it worked remotely from its first days.
Wiz’s central idea was to make cloud security simple enough for people who were not specialists. Instead of installing software on every machine, a customer grants Wiz read access to its accounts on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud or Kubernetes. Within minutes Wiz maps the whole environment as a graph and looks for dangerous combinations of weaknesses: an unpatched server that is exposed to the internet and also holds keys to sensitive data, for example. Rather than burying teams in thousands of alerts, it highlights the few paths an attacker could actually use, so that developers as well as security staff can fix them.
Organisations adopted it at extraordinary speed. Wiz said it was the fastest software company ever to grow from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a milestone it reached in about eighteen months, and by 2024 it counted more than 40 per cent of the Fortune 100 among its customers, including banks, software companies and media groups.
Research that protects everyone
Beyond its products, Wiz built a research team that hunts for flaws in the cloud platforms themselves and reports them so that they can be fixed for every customer, not just Wiz’s own. In 2021 its researchers revealed ChaosDB, a series of flaws in Microsoft’s Azure Cosmos DB database service that could have let attackers read, change or delete databases belonging to thousands of Azure customers, and OMIGOD, a set of vulnerabilities in a little-known software agent quietly installed on many Azure machines. Later discoveries included a misconfiguration that would have let attackers tamper with Bing search results and reach users’ Office 365 email and documents, flaws in IBM and Oracle cloud services, and, in early 2025, a database belonging to the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek that had been left open to the internet with sensitive information inside.
Each discovery was disclosed to the provider and fixed before it could be widely exploited. Wiz also helped organisations measure their exposure to the Log4Shell vulnerability of late 2021, one of the most serious software flaws in years, and supports a public database of cloud vulnerabilities. For millions of people whose data sits in cloud systems they will never see, this quieter work may matter as much as any product.
Saying no to Google, then yes
In March 2024 Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and its parent Alphabet, emailed Rappaport to express interest in Wiz. Rappaport did not notice the message for some time; when they met that spring, Google went on to offer about $23 billion. In July 2024 Rappaport told employees that Wiz would turn it down and pursue a stock-market listing and $1 billion in annual revenue instead. “Saying no to such humbling offers is tough,” he wrote, “but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.”
Talks later resumed, and on 18 March 2025 Alphabet announced that it would buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, the largest acquisition in Google’s history and the largest ever of an Israeli technology company. After regulators in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere cleared the deal without conditions, it was completed on 11 March 2026. Wiz joined Google Cloud while keeping its brand and its commitment to protecting customers on every cloud. In a post after the deal closed, Rappaport said that the company’s mission is unchanged, but that generative AI is moving so quickly into how organisations build software that security must evolve at the same pace.
An unpretentious founder
For a man whose company sold for one of the largest sums in the history of technology, Rappaport is known for his lack of interest in status. Calcalist reported that he did not own a car, rented his apartment in central Tel Aviv and usually wore T-shirts and jeans; he describes himself as an introvert. He insists that the four founders are equal partners, and credits Wiz’s success above all to people and processes rather than technology. “Each co-founder has a distinct personality,” he told Index Ventures. “It allows us to bring out the best in each other.” He lives with his long-time partner.
Under his leadership Wiz was reported to be the first company in Israel to offer employees grants for surrogacy, open to same-sex and heterosexual couples alike. Rappaport has also spoken publicly on Israeli civic issues, joining other technology leaders in opposing the government’s 2023 judicial overhaul plans.
Israeli identity and legacy
Rappaport is an Israeli Jew whose career has been shaped by the country’s distinctive institutions: the army’s technology units, its universities and its dense network of young founders and investors. Much of Wiz’s engineering remained in Tel Aviv even as its headquarters moved to New York, and its sale to Google became a landmark for Israel’s technology industry. In 2026 The Jerusalem Post ranked him seventh on its annual list of the fifty most influential Jews in the world.
His impact is mostly invisible, as good security usually is. Every day, Wiz’s software scans the cloud systems of a large share of the world’s biggest companies for the openings that criminals and hostile states look for, and its researchers close holes in the platforms on which much of modern life now runs. Rappaport’s contribution has been to make that protection faster, simpler and usable by ordinary engineering teams, helping to keep the personal data of millions of people out of the wrong hands.
Sources & further reading
Assaf Rappaport, Wikipedia · Cloud Captains: How Assaf Rappaport and his extraordinary co-founders built the world’s fastest-growing company, Index Ventures · Wiz walks away from Google’s $23B acquisition offer: read the CEO’s note to employees, TechCrunch · Google Completes Acquisition of Wiz, Google Cloud Press Corner · Profile of the Wiz founders, Calcalist (CTech) · Wiz, Inc., Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.