Assaf Rappaport

Origins and early life

Assaf Rappaport, born in Israel on 28 August 1983, is the co-founder and chief executive of Wiz.

Work and career

He read computer science, physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and took a master's in computer science at the Technion, and in the army he passed through Talpiot, then Unit 81, a secret technological unit, and served as a captain in Unit 8200. With Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik he founded Adallom in 2012 — the name comes from ad halom, 'up to here', the biblical phrase Israelis use for the last line of defence — which Microsoft bought in July 2015 for 320 million dollars and turned into what is now Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps; Rappaport then headed Microsoft's Israel research and development centre.

He and his three future partners met in July 2001 on the bus to the IDF induction centre and served together in the Intelligence Corps, in Units 8200 and 81. In January 2020 the four founded Wiz, a cloud security company that scans infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and Kubernetes for combinations of risk that would let an attacker take control or carry data off. Wiz claimed in 2022 to be the fastest company ever to go from one million to a hundred million dollars of annual recurring revenue; by late 2024 it employed some two thousand people, most of its engineers in Tel Aviv.

In March 2025 Alphabet announced it would buy the company for about 32 billion dollars, and the sale closed on 11 March 2026: the largest acquisition of an Israeli technology company to date. The Jerusalem Post placed the four founders tenth in its list of the fifty most influential Jews of 2025.