Last July, Israeli cybersecurity company Orca Security sued Wiz, which is also Israeli. Orca demanded that Wiz should stop selling its products, which Orca claimed infringed its patents, and also demanded financial compensation for the use of them. Orca further claimed that, besides copying its technology, Wiz copied its marketing materials, and hired the same lawyer who had registered its own patents. "Wiz has built its business on a simple business plan: copy Orca," the statement of claim says.
The Delaware District Court required Wiz to produce relevant internal technical documents describing the design of its product, but dismissed Orca’s request that Wiz should produce other technical documents, among other things the source code of its cloud platform. The court has denied Wiz’s motion that the lawsuit should be dismissed.
Each company is required to discover documents to an expert appointed by the court. The content of the documents will not be made public. The date set down for the case to be heard before a jury is December 7, 2025.
Both companies operate in the same field: agentless data security on the cloud, a method that makes cloud security much simpler.
Orca Security was founded in 2019 by a group of former Check Point (Nasdaq: CHKP) employees, headed by Avi Shua, formerly chief technologist at Check Point, who served as CEO of Orca until last year, when he was replaced by co-founder Gil Geron. Wiz was founded a year later, by former employees of Microsoft, among them Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Roy Reznik, and Yinon Costica. This month, Wiz completed the largest ever financing round by a privately-held Israeli company raising $1 billion at a valuation of $12 billion.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 26, 2024.
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