Wiz and Orca agree to end bitter legal battle, dismissing all claims
A two-year legal feud between Israeli cloud security rivals comes to a definitive close.
The long-running patent dispute between cloud security rivals Wiz and Orca Security has come to an abrupt and definitive end.
In a stipulation filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware on Tuesday, the two companies agreed to dismiss all claims and counterclaims with prejudice, formally ending a lawsuit that had dragged on for more than two years and once threatened to spill into a jury trial. Under the agreement, each side will bear its own legal costs and attorneys’ fees.
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Wiz's Assaf Rappaport and Orca's Gil Geron.
(Photos: Orca Security and Netanel Tobias)
The filing leaves no room for revival. A dismissal with prejudice permanently bars either company from re-litigating the same claims, drawing a firm line under one of the most closely watched legal battles in Israeli cybersecurity.
The move comes just weeks after a series of damaging setbacks for Orca at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In December, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that all claims in three of the six patents Orca asserted against Wiz were unpatentable, including the two patents that formed the original backbone of Orca’s lawsuit when it was filed in July 2023.
Those decisions did not technically end the case on their own. Orca retained the right to seek rehearing, pursue higher-level review within the Patent Office, or appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, steps that could have stretched well into 2026. But the joint dismissal suggests that, after months of parallel legal maneuvering, neither side saw a path forward worth pursuing.
Before the dismissal, the Delaware lawsuit had already been largely sidelined. Earlier this year, the court agreed to pause proceedings while the Patent Office reviewed the validity of Orca’s patents, a strategic move by Wiz that ultimately reshaped the case.
As the PTAB process unfolded, Orca expanded its lawsuit from two patents to six. Yet with half of those patents now invalidated and the remaining three still under review, the scope of the dispute had narrowed dramatically. What once appeared to be a sweeping challenge to Wiz’s core technology was increasingly at risk of collapsing into a far smaller, more technical fight.
The stipulation filed this week closes that door entirely. All claims, defenses, and counterclaims, including Wiz’s challenges and Orca’s infringement allegations, are now dismissed permanently.
Allegations That Will Never Reach a Jury
At the heart of the lawsuit were Orca’s claims that Wiz had built its cloud security platform by copying Orca’s patented approach to agentless cloud security. Orca alleged that Wiz’s founders were exposed to its technology while working at Microsoft and later used that knowledge to create a competing product.
Wiz consistently denied those allegations, choosing instead to attack the validity of Orca’s patents rather than litigate infringement head-on. That strategy produced concrete results at the Patent Office, and ultimately appears to have set the stage for the case’s quiet conclusion.
With the dismissal, those allegations will never be tested before a jury. The discovery process, which had already begun before the stay, including the appointment of outside experts to examine possible infringement, is now moot.
The legal battle unfolded against a backdrop of sharply diverging corporate trajectories.
Orca, founded earlier, raised $640 million and reached a $1.8 billion valuation in 2021, becoming one of Israel’s best-funded private cybersecurity companies. Wiz, founded later by Assaf Rappaport and team, grew at a blistering pace and was acquired last year by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in a $32 billion deal.
