Fazal Merchant Named President and CFO of Wiz

At a glance

From Tanium to Wiz

Wiz, the cloud security company, named Fazal Merchant its president and chief financial officer in January 2025. Merchant is a familiar name in security. He joined endpoint management company Tanium in April 2017 as COO and CFO, became co-CEO in June 2019 and stepped down in September 2020. Before Tanium he was a finance executive at DreamWorks Animation.

The job at Wiz

At Wiz, Merchant’s job is to run the company’s financial strategy and operations and get it ready to go public. Reuters reported that the hire was part of Wiz’s preparation for an IPO, after the company walked away from a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google in 2024.

Wiz sells into a crowded market. Companies running workloads across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud need one view of their risk, and Wiz built its business on providing it.

An IPO-ready company

Wiz’s product scans cloud environments for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities and maps how an attacker could chain them together. Its fast revenue growth made it one of the most closely watched private companies in security.

Bringing in a CFO with experience preparing a company for public markets is a standard step before an IPO. Merchant had a similar mandate at Tanium, where he was hired in 2017 with an eye to a future listing.

What it signals for security startups

The hire is a signal to the rest of the market. Security startups that grew fast during the cloud boom are building the finance and operations teams public investors expect. Competitors and investors watch moves like this for clues about when listings might come.

Other cloud security vendors face pressure to show the same discipline, especially as buyers consolidate tools and favor larger platforms.

Then Google came back

Weeks after this article first ran, plans changed. On March 18, 2025, Google agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, its largest acquisition ever. The deal required regulatory approval.

That made Merchant’s role about getting the company through a sale and integration instead of a listing.

Questions for Wiz customers

Merchant’s career tracks the way security companies grow up: from fast-growing private startup to a public listing or a sale to a much larger buyer. For security teams that use Wiz, the practical questions are about product roadmap and pricing once the company is part of Google Cloud, and whether it keeps supporting other clouds as well as it does today.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.