Google's parent company Alphabet is close to signing its biggest deal ever, for $23 billion dollars, with the Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. According to sources familiar with the matter, the deal may be closed soon.
This is also the biggest deal ever in Israeli high-tech, after Intel's purchase of Mobileye in 2017, for about $15.3 billion.
Wiz was founded by CEO Assaf Rappaport; VP of Products Yinon Costica, VP of Technologies Ami Lutbek and VP of Research and Development Roy Reznik. The entire team has been working together for more than 20 years - including as the managers of Microsoft's cloud security group, which purchased Adallom, which they founded, for approximately $320 million.
In May, Wiz raised $1 billion at a valuation of $12 billion. Wiz recently predicted that 2024 will be the "year of consolidation" in the field of cyber security; in April it announced the acquisition of Gem Security, as part of the expansion of the company's cloud application security platform, and in December it acquired the start-up Raftt. The company tried unsuccessfully in the last year to acquire Sentinel One and Lysork.
At the end of 2023, the company reached a sales volume of $350 million, after becoming the fastest-growing software company in the world - and reached an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of $100 million within 18 months from the day it started selling its products. At the beginning of the year, Wiz announced the appointment of Dali Rajak, former chief operating officer and president of the public cyber company Zyskyler, as president and chief operating officer.
The company enables security and development teams to identify, prioritize and prevent complex cloud risks that penetrate between the different cloud layers. The technology scans the cloud environment, on all its different layers, through a simple API interface. This is how an in-depth analysis of the resources in the cloud is performed, including the network structure, access permissions and configuration errors that could be an opening for attackers. In addition, the platform also scans the application and software layer, and identifies weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Finally, it combines all the findings into one clear picture of the most essential risks in the cloud by calculating hundreds of different risks and the contexts between them.
More than double Google's biggest deal to date
Despite a market value of more than $2 trillion, Google has been a conservative acquirer compared to some of its competitors in recent years, and has managed to avoid huge acquisitions, such as Microsoft's $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn.
Google's acquisition of Wiz, if it goes through, would far surpass Google's biggest deal to date, which was the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility that closed in 2012. Google has worked in recent years to expand its cyber security business, focusing on the cloud. Its biggest recent acquisition – and second biggest ever – was a $5.4 billion acquisition two years ago of another security firm, Mandiant.