Eon vs. Wiz: Different unicorn eras, similar early signals
Eon is not the next Wiz. But its first couple of years look a lot like Wiz’s, and that may be the reason investors are treating it as one of Israel’s next defining companies.
When Eon announced on Tuesday that it had raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation, less than two years after it was founded, the news instantly invited comparisons to another Israeli cloud giant: Wiz. But while Wiz is now deep into an acquisition process with Google at a $32 billion valuation, the more meaningful comparison lies not in their current scale, but in how both companies looked in their earliest days.
Each began with a similar formula: deeply technical founders, an immediate surge of investor demand, and an enterprise problem large enough to support a multibillion-dollar outcome. And in both cases, the speed of capital deployment in the first 18-24 months is what set the tone for everything that followed.
Wiz was founded in 2020. Eon in early 2024. They are not peers in maturity, customers, or market geography. Wiz is a global security platform with over $500 million in ARR; Eon is still private, still withholding revenue numbers, and still building out its product footprint.
But their beginning trajectories tell a remarkably similar story about how Israeli cloud companies now scale. Wiz, in its first year, raised $100 million in a rapid Series A nine months after launch. Eon raised $200 million before turning one year old and has now reached $500 million total funding.
And yet the two companies chose very different early strategies.
Wiz made a point of broadcasting its milestones: customer wins, revenue leaps, valuation jumps. That visibility created a flywheel of investor confidence that accelerated its path to becoming the world’s largest cybersecurity unicorn, and ultimately attracted a strategic suitor willing to pay a historic sum.
Eon is pursuing the opposite strategy. CEO Ofir Ehrlich said revenue tripled this year, serving “a few tens” of large customers such as SoFi. But he declined to disclose any financial metrics, choosing to grow behind closed doors even as valuation surged.
In their first phases, both companies secured unusually high levels of investor conviction. The shared pattern is not coincidence. Both companies were founded by leaders with exit histories and deep cloud-infrastructure expertise.
Wiz’s founders came out of Microsoft Azure security. Eon’s came out of AWS and had already sold one company to Amazon.
The divergence begins after the starting point.
Wiz scaled into one of the most strategically sensitive domains in enterprise tech: cloud security. Its customer adoption grew explosively, more than enough for Google to view it as a transformational acquisition.
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Eon is building further down the infrastructure stack, tackling cloud backup data, a domain traditionally treated as dead storage. Its bet is that the rise of AI will turn that “cold data” into one of the most valuable inputs for analytics and model training.
If Wiz built the system to guard today’s cloud, Eon wants to organize the decades of data needed for tomorrow’s AI.
By the numbers, Wiz and Eon no longer share a level playing field. One is the world’s most valuable cybersecurity startup. The other is a two-year-old company still defining its product category.
But their opening moves - hyperscale fundraising, immediate investor consensus, and the gravity of their founding teams - reflect a broader shift in Israeli enterprise tech: the beginning, not the middle, is now where the biggest bets are being made.
Eon is not the next Wiz. But its first couple of years look a lot like Wiz’s, and that may be the reason investors are treating it as one of Israel’s next defining companies.
