Darktrace vs Wiz

By valuation, Wiz is the larger company at $32B versus $5.3B — a 6x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Darktrace employs 1000-5000 people while Wiz has 1250 employees.

Wiz has raised more in total funding at $1.9B, compared to Darktrace's $230M — a gap of $1.7B. Combined, the two companies have completed 7 known funding rounds.

Wiz leads with an Awaira Score of 95/100, while Darktrace sits at 85/100. That 10-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Darktrace was founded by Poppy Gustafsson in 2013. Wiz was founded by Assaf Rappaport in 2020. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Darktrace: Darktrace is an AI cybersecurity company that applies unsupervised machine learning to detect and respond to cyber threats inside enterprise networks, email systems, cloud environments, and operational technology. The Cambridge-based company pioneered the concept of the enterprise immune system, training AI models on each organisation normal network behaviour to identify anomalies that indicate intrusion, insider threat, or ransomware activity in real time without requiring predefined threat signatures.\n\nThe company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, raising approximately $230 million in its IPO after backing from Invoke Capital, Vitruvian Partners, and KKR. Darktrace reports over 9,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries, including significant deployments in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. The company has expanded from network detection to autonomous response capabilities through its Antigena product, which can quarantine infected systems and neutralise threats without human intervention.\n\nDarktrace competes in the AI-native cybersecurity market against CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft Defender, as well as against SIEM vendors including Splunk and IBM QRadar. The company valuation and public market performance have been volatile, reflecting broader uncertainty around AI cybersecurity spending cycles and questions about autonomous response effectiveness in complex enterprise environments. Its AI self-learning approach, applied consistently across network, email, cloud, and OT security, remains a distinctive architecture compared to detection-rule-based competitors, and the Poppy Gustafsson leadership profile has made Darktrace a flagship case study for UK technology entrepreneurship. Wiz: Wiz is an Israeli cloud security company founded in 2020 that specializes in cloud infrastructure entitlement management and security. The platform provides real-time visibility and control across cloud environments, focusing on identifying and remediating security risks in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Wiz's core offering combines cloud asset inventory, vulnerability management, and identity and access management capabilities to detect misconfigurations and unauthorized access paths. The company employs graph-based analysis to map attack paths and prioritize remediation efforts based on actual risk exposure rather than theoretical vulnerabilities. Wiz has achieved significant market traction, reaching a $32 billion valuation following substantial funding rounds totaling $1,900 million. The company serves enterprise customers across financial services, technology, and healthcare sectors. Its competitive positioning emphasizes speed of deployment and accuracy in threat detection compared to traditional cloud security solutions. Wiz demonstrates strong growth trajectory with rapid customer acquisition and expansion of platform capabilities. The company has been acquired, representing a significant exit in the cloud security market. Its success reflects growing enterprise demand for comprehensive cloud security solutions as organizations accelerate cloud migration and require sophisticated tools to manage expanding attack surfaces and identity-based threats in distributed cloud infrastructures. Wiz's graph-based approach to mapping attack paths within cloud environments differentiates it from traditional vulnerability scanning tools.

Darktrace got there first, launching in 2013 — that's 7 years of extra runway. Wiz didn't arrive until 2020. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Darktrace has about 1000-5000 employees; Wiz has about 1250. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Darktrace and Wiz compete in AI Security, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.