Wiz: Building a portfolio that held up when it mattered most

How M&B IP helped Wiz go from pre-seed startup to the largest cybersecurity acquisition in history, with an IP strategy built to last.

Category tags: Cloud security | Patent strategy | Startup to exit

Entering a market that plays hardball

When Wiz’s founders came to M&B IP in late 2020, the company hadn’t yet settled on its name. What it did have was a clear-eyed view of what it was walking into: a cybersecurity market dominated by incumbents like Palo Alto Networks and Check Point. Capturing meaningful market share in that environment required defensible IP, built from the ground up.

The founders understood this from day one. IP wasn’t treated as a strategic priority, given the same weight as product development and R&D from the very beginning.

Embedded, not just retained

Early work focused on mapping Wiz’s core technology and identifying the pillars that needed protecting. M&B IP led this initial effort directly, working with the founders to define the foundational areas of the portfolio. But as Wiz scaled and its technical team grew, the engagement needed to evolve.

The answer was embedding. One of M&B IP’s partners began working out of the Wiz office one to two days a week. This was critical because attention is the scarcest resource in a fast-moving startup. Everyone is running multiple workstreams at once, and carving out time for IP discussions can be difficult. Short communication loops, established relationships, and the ability to have a conversation in the moment changed the quality of the output.

It also changed the time horizon of the filings. Inventors naturally focus on what’s shipping in the next quarter. The M&B IP process pushed them to think further out: to file patents that would still be relevant five or more years later.

Built to scale without the overhead

Over five years, Wiz built a portfolio of hundreds of issued patents without ever hiring in-house patent counsel. The average time a Wiz team member spent per application was around one hour. The embedded model made that possible. By absorbing the process overhead on M&B IP’s side, it kept the burden on Wiz’s technical team low enough to scale.

A portfolio with a spine

As the engagement deepened, M&B IP developed what became the structural logic of the entire portfolio: foundational building blocks. Rather than filing individual patents in isolation, the team drafted core documents around Wiz’s fundamental technologies that could be referenced and extended by subsequent filings.

These included:

• Graph-based security
• Agentless scanning
• Remediation and Mitigation
• Agentic workflows

This approach had several compounding advantages. It created consistent terminology across the portfolio, so inventors didn’t have to relearn definitions and patent examiners weren’t encountering a new conceptual framework with every filing. It made individual patents easier to prosecute and more defensible in litigation, because a coherent portfolio tells a clearer story to a patent office than a collection of disconnected filings. It also made the portfolio legible to stakeholders: at any point, M&B IP could present a clear map of which branches of the portfolio were well-developed and which needed reinforcement.

The portfolio eventually spanned everything from artificial intelligence to fundamental cloud computing operations. Cybersecurity remained the foundation, but the technology pillars rising from it gave Wiz the breadth to remain an industry leader across multiple domains simultaneously. This is a rare achievement, particularly for a startup.

Balancing Stealth and Publication

Building a strong portfolio also means knowing when to hold back. M&B IP was always aware that patent filings are public documents, and that the wrong disclosure at the wrong moment can hand competitors a roadmap. Early in the process, a number of Wiz’s applications were filed with non-publication requests, keeping them confidential while the technology matured and the competitive environment became clearer.

The concern wasn’t only competitive. In cybersecurity specifically, disclosing the precise contours of a capability in a patent filing can expose the same information to bad actors looking for ways around it. Every filing decision involved weighing the value of protection against the cost of visibility.

“IP is an asset that affects your eventual exit, whether that’s M&A or IPO. The earlier you think about this, the better position you will be in. Having IP is like getting in shape. Sure, you can get in shape at any point in life, but the earlier you start the easier it is. It’s considerably more expensive and a harder process to take a Series D company into an IP strategy than it is to build one from the ground up at Series A.”

— Ophir, M&B IP

The outcome: Wiz dominates in patent quality

In 2025, Wiz was named a top 3 patent filer globally by patent quality overall, and number 1 in patent quality in cybersecurity. This ranking accounts for both the volume of grants in a given year and the quality scores those patents receive. Achieving both simultaneously is one of the hardest things to do in patent strategy, and it reflects the cumulative effect of the approach M&B IP had built from the beginning. Wiz’s CTO, Ami Luttwak, is today recognized as one of the most prolific Israeli inventors at the USPTO.

When Google announced its acquisition of Wiz, the portfolio Wiz had built over five years became subject to the kind of scrutiny that acquirers at that scale apply. Companies acquiring at that valuation have learned from experience what a poorly constructed patent portfolio costs them. A portfolio with gaps, inconsistencies, or vulnerabilities in its core claims creates risk that is reflected in deal terms. A cohesive, well-prosecuted portfolio built around foundational technologies does the opposite.

If you’re building an IP strategy at seed or Series A, the best time to start is now.

The team behind the work