Google is making the biggest acquisition in its history. The company’s parent company Alphabet is buying Wiz, the cloud security startup, for $32 billion in an all-cash transaction. The deal has now been confirmed.
A source described the transaction as a $33 billion deal previously. That includes the $1 billion that Google is paying out on top of the acquisition price in the form of retention bonuses to make sure everyone stays on post-acquisition. With 1,700 people working at the company, that works out on average to more than $588,000 per employee (actual numbers likely to go up and down depending on their respective salaries).
Wiz will remain an independent platform that will work across all cloud providers, not just Google Cloud Platform. There will be more hiring to expand the business, and likely more acquisitions, which is something Wiz has been working to do for the last year.
Our sources tell us that Wiz is at $700 million in annual recurring revenue at the moment. The deal is being described to us as akin to the one between LinkedIn and Microsoft, in terms of autonomy within the bigger organization. (It should be noted that LinkedIn does use a lot of Microsoft services, and has increased that over time, so perhaps that’s a more meaningful analogy than was intended.)
The deal will still need regulatory and other approvals before closing, which the companies expect will be in 2026. Previously, Google’s biggest acquisition had been buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2011.
This acquisition has been on-again off-again for nearly a year. Talks appeared to revive again this week at a $30 billion price tag.
Thomas Kurian — the CEO of Google Cloud — is in Europe at the moment, and Assaf Rappaport, the CEO of New York-based Wiz, is currently in Israel. From what we understand, Kurian was leading on this deal, and Wiz will come under his wing, spearheading a major push into cloud security for the company.
“Google Cloud and Wiz share a joint vision to make cybersecurity more accessible and simpler to use for organizations of any size and industry,” he said in a statement today. “Enabling more companies to prevent cyber attacks, including in very complex business software environments, will help organizations minimize the cost, disruption and hassle caused by cybersecurity incidents.”
Some backstory. Last year, Google offered to buy Wiz for $23 billion, but the talks fell apart, sources say over concerns about antitrust issues, Wiz’s autonomy for development under Google Cloud and potentially even the price tag. At the time of the deal talks, Wiz was valued at $12 billion based on a $1 billion funding round earlier in the year.
In the interim, there is now a new U.S. President and some believe the new regulatory regime will usher in a more favorable climate for big tech acquisitions that might have previously been roadblocked.
For its part, Google has been interested scooping up Wiz to turbo charge in two areas: enterprise cloud, a business where it continues to lag behind AWS and Microsoft Azure; and security, an area where it does offer some products (Mandiant being one key part of that) but nothing on the size, scale, or growth trajectory of Wiz.
Wiz is particularly attractive because it’s coming to Google Cloud with an existing, massive business in tow. It is currently on track to double last year’s annual recurring revenue to $1 billion.
A Wiz acquisition also works to potentially complement, or even offset, whatever rises and falls might come to the other major area where Alphabet is placing bets: AI.
“The increased role of AI, and adoption of cloud services, have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security,” Google noted in its announcement today.
Not long after the deal initially fell apart in 2024, Wiz ran a secondary sale at a $16 billion valuation, meaning this acquisition doubles that valuation. That’s a huge windfall for Wiz’s investors, which include the likes of Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, Salesforce, Thrive Capital, Greenoaks and around two dozen others.
Rumors were that Wiz — whose founders previously co-founded and sold a security startup to Microsoft, which became the anchor of the company’s cloud security business — was in the process of fundraising at an even higher valuation.
Last year on stage at Disrupt, Rappaport didn’t rule out the possibility of an acquisition in the future but he also confirmed that it was Wiz who walked away from the deal, describing it as “the toughest decision ever” but also maintaining it was “the right choice.”
On a purely financial outcome, it looks like his instinct has held true.
We will listen into the investor call later today and will update this story with more detail as it emerges.
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