Orca suffers patent setback in cloud security dispute with Wiz
U.S. patent judges ruled three of the six patents at the center of Orca’s lawsuit unpatentable, weakening its case against rival Wiz while appeals and further decisions remain pending.
A central pillar of Orca Security’s patent case against its rival Wiz has begun to crumble.
U.S. patent judges have ruled that several of the patents Orca relied on to sue Wiz cannot be upheld, dealing an early but meaningful blow to a lawsuit that has been dragging on for more than two years. In a joint notice filed recently in federal court in Delaware, the two companies disclosed that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) found all claims in three of Orca’s patents to be unpatentable.
1 View gallery
Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Orca CEO Gil Geron.
(Photos: Orca Security and Netanel Tobias)
Those three patents make up half of the six Orca has asserted in its infringement suit against Wiz. Notably, they include the two patents on which Orca originally built its case when it first went to court in July 2023.
The PTAB’s decisions, issued on December 8, are the first definitive rulings to emerge from a broader set of patent challenges that have effectively put the Delaware lawsuit on ice. Earlier this year, the court agreed to pause the case after Wiz asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to review the validity of Orca’s patents.
Orca later broadened its lawsuit to cover six patents in total. With three now struck down, the remaining three are still under review, and final decisions on those are expected in January. Depending on how those rulings land, large parts of Orca’s case could fall away, or the dispute could narrow to a much smaller fight.
Even so, the legal battle is far from over. Orca retains the right to seek rehearing or higher-level review within the Patent Office and can appeal the PTAB’s decisions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The deadlines for those next steps stretch into early 2026.
Meanwhile, the Delaware case itself remains frozen in place. Before the stay, the court had rejected Wiz’s attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out entirely and ordered the parties into discovery. That process included appointing outside experts to examine whether Wiz’s products infringed Orca’s technology. A jury trial had once been penciled in for December, but that schedule was overtaken by the patent review proceedings now unfolding.
At the heart of the dispute is Orca’s claim that Wiz built its cloud security business by infringing Orca’s patented technology. Orca has argued that it pioneered the approach and that Wiz’s founders, who previously worked at Microsoft, were exposed to Orca’s ideas before launching their own company. Wiz has consistently denied those allegations, choosing instead to attack the validity of Orca’s patents, a strategy that has now produced tangible results.
According to Orca’s original lawsuit, "Wiz was birthed from the very beginning as a counterfeit copy of Orca’s ideas - Mr. Shua (Orca co-founder) had presented Orca’s Platform to Wiz’s founders at Microsoft in May 2019, and the so-called “insight” of which Wiz boasts was nothing more than the misappropriation of Mr. Shua’s ideas and Orca’s technology as presented to Wiz’s founders before they formed Wiz and sought to launch a copycat competitor to Orca. It was at this 2019 meeting that Mr. Shua explained how cloud security would forever be changed by his novel agentless cloud security platform as implemented in Orca’s cloud-native security platform. Within months, the Wiz founders left their lucrative careers at Microsoft to start Wiz, build a clone of Orca’s technology, and compete directly with Orca."
The legal fight has played out alongside starkly different corporate milestones. Orca has raised $640 million since its founding and reached a $1.8 billion valuation in 2021. Wiz, by contrast, was acquired earlier this year by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in a $32 billion deal, a backdrop that only heightens the stakes of a dispute that is still very much unresolved.
