> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors<p>> Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million<p>> Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all of whom previously founded Adallom.<p>> Adallom was founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, who are former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200 and alumni of the Talpiot program.<p>> Adallom was reportedly acquired by Microsoft for $320 million in July 2015<p>> On March 18, 2025, Google announced an all-cash acquisition of Wiz for $32 billion<p>Had never heard of Wiz until they posted the blog post about the DeepSeek database being public earlier this year.<p><a href="https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepseek-database-leak" rel="nofollow">https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepse...</a>
Imho, and as a xoogler who's been in Google Cloud's ecosystem the past few years, Google Cloud's three big focus areas have been AI (this is an evolution from their historical focus on data, then also analytics), Distributed Cloud (Anthos++) and security (post the Mandiant acquisition). They'll never be able to compete on base infra, given their late entry into the game, lack of presence in certain markets, and the lock the competition has in some industries (Azure in industrial/mfg, AWS in pharma, etc), and they know that, so they've lately been focused on what they believe they can control. One of those things is the narrative that Google Cloud is the most secure cloud.<p>It shouldn't be overlooked that acquiring Wiz is also a way for Google to secure a beachhead in half the Fortune 100, many of which are "enemy" territory.<p>The price is high, but there aren't many options available and Wiz has the advantage of being built on Google Cloud natively, and already have Marketplace integrations completed.<p><a href="https://cloud.google.com/customers/wiz" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/customers/wiz</a>
This makes no sense.<p>Assume 1,000 customers each generating $2m in ARR with contracts. That’s $2 billion. Assume generous 6x ARR valuation, that’s $12 billion.<p>Where is this $20 billion premium coming from? How could the board approve this? How is this fair to shareholders?<p>Heck, as a minor shareholder in GOOG, I don’t find this financially responsible at all.<p>I can’t help but think sometimes these tech acquisitions have some hint of nepotism/deeper underlying motivations behind them than meets the eye.
I'm surprised this acquisition didn't happen sooner. The first time I used Wiz I knew a big cloud provider would be snatching them up at some point. Why? Because every enterprise that decides to use cloud providers then needs to find someone to keep that cloud environment safe.<p>But also, and may more important, you get to see everyones cloud usage, across all providers, with a high level of permissions. Said differently, Google can now target customers with massive spend across other cloud providers and work to migrate them to GCP, at a price that's <i>just</i> cheap enough to over come the switching cost.
This deal isn't about security, it's about data.<p>Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.<p>This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selling point - "agent-less scanning" which is unlike traditional security tools that require an agent installed in the OS. Instead, Wiz is able to just clone your full data volume and scan it locally in their cloud accounts/VPC.<p>With this deal Google has bought a ton of confidential data from Wiz's customers without their explicit knowledge or approval, and they will use it to improve Google's AI models like Gemini and probably several other products.<p>A year ago Google struck a $60M/yr deal with Reddit to exclusively license their content [1] for the same reason, and that data is probably much smaller and less valuable than the data Wiz has access to from their customers, which include companies like Morgan Stanley, DocuSign, Slack, Plaid, and others. [2]<p>Sources:<p>0: <a href="https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com</a><p>1: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.wiz.io/customers" rel="nofollow">https://www.wiz.io/customers</a>
Rejecting a $23B offer to get $32B less than a year later doesn't sound half bad.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/23/24204198/google-wiz-acquisition-called-off-23-billion-cloud-cybersecurity" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/23/24204198/google-wiz-acqui...</a>
Customer feedback (2024), <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1c1s9r2/wiz_is_insert_your_experience/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1c1s9r2/wiz_...</a><p><i>> Wiz combines a graph search for asset management with agentless vuln and malware scanning that clones EBS volumes and scans them on their infrastructure. That's a great combo for vuln management, but has some downsides like delays between scans and cloud costs. They have a sensor with solid detection rules, and are okay at a bunch of other stuff like cloud log threat detection and sensitive data detection. They've basically pushed what you can do without an agent to the limit.</i><p>VC approach to enterprise sales, <a href="https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc" rel="nofollow">https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc</a> & <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042462">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042462</a><p><i>> [Cyberstarts] shows an internal rate of return of more than 100%, an unusual figure even for the best funds in the world.. The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund.. Ra'anan offers [CISOs] the big dream of the world of employees - shares in a venture capital fund.. all funds that specialize in cyber go after CISOs and entice them with dinners, conferences, and some also offer them holdings in the fund. However.. he perfected it to a completely different level.. No CISO has ever received compensation for purchasing products.. They receive 4% of the success fees of the general partner (GP) in the fund.</i>
I'm marginally in the IT space... Is there anything to my reaction that at least in dollar terms this is a multiple of the dollar amount of what Whatsapp was acquired back in the day, which was a large consumer facing product that I could see was quite literally taking over messaging all over the world, and this is a... platform I've never heard of?<p>I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.
Just think: This company is 5 years old. That's just 1825 days, or 43800 hours, and they've created $32B of "value" in that time. That's an average rate of almost $750k/hour continuously. Incredible.
Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034</a><p>That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.
This is probably a dumb question, but what does all cash mean? Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders?<p>What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google shares), or something of that sort?
This seems like a silly and ridiculous acquisition. Surely for $32 billion almost any security technology could be replicated? You could hire several thousand best in class engineers and build whatever Wiz has in house… buying this almost makes it seem like Google has no idea how to build new innovative products, which I guess a lot of people already think.<p>For Instagram and WhatsApp it was the user base and growth that was being bought, which is much harder to acquire than some random B2B saas security software.
Extracting this from my comment on a subthread to add color to the discussion here.<p>They announced in a blog post that they went from $1m ARR to $100m ARR in 18 months (Feb 2021 -> July 2022). [1]<p>Reuters in the article posted here reports they were at $500m ARR when they last raised in mid-2024, meaning they went from $100m to $500m in around 2 years.<p>One would thus speculate they are likely a few hundred million above the half-a-billion figure today.<p>The multiple still appears a little high to me (particularly given it's all-cash, which Google doesn't even have) but what do I know.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-the-fastest-growing-software-company-ever" rel="nofollow">https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-th...</a>
One wonders if $32B spent "pluggin' up the holes" would accomplish more. A lot of open source code could be rewritten at this price point.
Looks like they already have the Gemini logo so integration should be simple<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)#/media/File%3AWiz_company_logo.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)#/media/File%3A...</a>
Wiz seems to only be about 4 years old, as per wikipedia. That valuation in such a short amount of time surely must be some kind of record? Or am I missing something?
This feels like Waze, founder origins and name similarities aside. Google acquired them in 2013 for $1.3 billion, and it is still a standalone app, without being fully integrated into Google Maps.<p>It makes no sense for a company to have two mapping applications, yet 15 years later, more than a billion paid, one of the most valuable companies in the world failed to integrate another app.<p>Most people using Waze have no idea that it is owned by Google.
>The stock was down 13% this year before Tuesday on worries over its hefty AI spending against the rise of China's lower-cost DeepSeek and a pullback in tech giants that led the market for the past two years.<p>Absurd take. Google is the one AI company that is not completely dependent on Nvidia because they now use their own TPU chips for both inference and training.
>Assaf Rappaport and his co-founders now stand to make more than $3 billion each from the sale...<p><a href="https://archive.ph/SoeUd" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/SoeUd</a>
tbh all of this sounds extremely suspicious. nothing they do google can't do, market share is not there for $32B, it's a couple of years old company. If it's not money laundering, which I presume it's not, what is it? It doesn't make any sense.
This is one example of ways that the US empire supports the economy of Israel (the 51st state). I would be very surprised if there isn’t a political element here.
Here's some context in what this means:<p>Currently, Crowdstrike, Zscaler and other solutions compete in a similar space than Wiz.<p>Google likely believes if can offer Wiz sec products bundled with Google Cloud. It isn't a terrible idea.<p>But Wiz itself works on multiple clouds, so it seems that Google can also grow it on their own.<p>Cloud security companies are growing a lot, and might be a growth lever for Alphabet, as its other businesses' revenue growth are slowing down.<p>My assumption is that this will actually make it easier for Crowdstrike and Zscaler to keep their market share, as they are pure-play companies on Cloud security and Alphabet has too many businesses to manage.<p>For me, it looks overpriced. Wiz has been growing a lot, but under Alphabet it might not perform as well as it did.<p>The big winners are the founders and whoever owned Wiz options.
Great article on the genesis of Wiz:<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-built-a-cybersecurity-unicorn-machine-then-came-his-conflict-of-interest-mess/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250312193110/https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-built-a-cybersecurity-unicorn-machine-then-came-his-conflict-of-interest-mess/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250312193110/https://www.forbe...</a>
There is a not-so well known fact about Wiz. Wiz is backed by Cyberstart. They are notorious for running a pay to use thing for CISOs. TLDR; there is a round about way the CISOs get paid for using tools backed by them. Therefore the startups backed by them appears to be fast growing.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/cyberstarts-" rel="nofollow">https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/cyberstarts-</a>
program-sparks-debate-over-ethical-boundaries-p-3763<p>[2] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-built-a-cybersecurity-unicorn-machine-then-came-his-conflict-of-interest-mess/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...</a>
I still find it amazing that:<p>- Businesses pay the cloud providers to allow them to use compute/disk/network<p>- Businesses pay to hire the engineers who can work on cloud<p>- Businesses pay to hire security engineers who can secure the applications in cloud<p>- Businesses pay to hire FinOps to optimize their cloud usage<p>- Businesses hire security companies to secure their cloud usage (e.g. Wiz was one such company)<p>- Now cloud provider has to acquire the security company to secure their own cloud?<p>Either I am too old, or there is something wrong here. Let's not forget that at the same time many big businesses do just fine by not using AWS/GCP/Azure.
Google already owns GCP. Wiz obviously built something that differentiates themselves and fills a need. I am sure they support GCP. If so, why would google not copy and develop this functionality themselves instead of buying them out?<p>Among the wiz customers if they use GCP already then surely they will be willing to try the functionality of google builds it.<p>If the customer doesn’t use GCP, chances are they wont move to GCP and probably move away from wiz too after the acquisition.<p>I don’t get why they bought them instead of copying them
The number of O(10)B$ companies acquired that I never heard of is alarmingly high. Someone should curate a list of them so I don't feel so clueless..
This deal might be more than just strengthening cloud security—it could be a strategic move for Google’s multi-cloud positioning. If Wiz’s customer insights help drive migrations to GCP, the $32B price tag starts to make more sense beyond just a tech acquisition
In a recent interview , one of the founders claimed that one of Wiz smart moves was using a graph database for mapping cloud resources and their relations, while perhaps all other competitors used SQL or NoSQL.<p>It helped them “get to the point” quicker and “cleaner”.
The founder's previous exit in the same space was sold to Microsoft for $350. What a steal.<p>The most amazing thing is that Wiz is a fairly young company. Founded in early 2000.<p>One thing for sure. If this guy ever starts another company, I'm sending my resume :)
"Israel literally owned Congress" - Donald Trump [1]<p>There has been a full and total coup of Zionist influence peddles over over the United States government. This is the lens in which you should look at this deal.<p>The Department of Education is on the verge of being abolished, and the remaining skeleton staff have been redirected to investigate cases of "antisemitism". [2]<p>The administration is weaponizing 'antisemitism' to unleash once unthinkable retributions against opponents of the State of Israel. The Zionist lobby is using the full levers of the US government to direct their wrath against opponents, and no one is being spared, not universities, students and even entire nations.<p>It would be naive to think the leadership at Alphabet are unaware of that good things happen when you be good to Zionists.<p>It's really a shame really, from 'Don't be Evil' to funding decades more years of 'Israeli Americans' using this wealth to funnel to AIPAC and other nefarious political causes. [3]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-israel-literally-owned-congress-a-decade-ago-today-its-the-opposite/" rel="nofollow">https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-israel-literally-owned-c...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://time.com/7268749/education-department-staff-cuts-impact-families-children-with-disabilities/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/7268749/education-department-staff-cuts-imp...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/whatsapp-founder-jan-koum-donates-record-2-million-to-aipacs-campaign-efforts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.timesofisrael.com/whatsapp-founder-jan-koum-dona...</a>
My take on why Google bought Wiz is pretty straightforward. First off, Wiz brings a rock-solid CRM loaded with all those juicy contracts from the top cloud players. Add to that a proven enterprise team that knows exactly how to sell the product, and whom to sell to. And you’ve got a recipe for success. Every Wiz win is just a possible upsell for GCP; especially when GCP isn’t even the market leader in cloud. IMO, it opens the door to a whole lot of sales opportunities and deep-rooted relationships with top-tier cloud customers. To me, that all points to a pretty hefty price tag on the table
I imagine Wiz was smart enough to include a big payout if the acquisition doesn't go through. There is a ton of attention on Google by both political parties in the US and the EU is not a fan either.
> $32 billion in an all-cash deal,<p>Wow. I wonder how Google justified this acquisition. I fear they will eventually shutter this service, and likely without even pulling anything good into their own cloud offerings.
Why isn't there an open source self hosted Wiz competitor, perhaps now one can start to emerge after this acquisition for those who don't want Google.
What the hell is "Wiz"? Some nobody company that was formed <5 yrs ago and now gets acquired for _$32B_<p>G might be the modern day IBM.<p>You would think G would have the brain power to compete and provide out of the box security for their own platform. I guess the MBA losers at the top have been shaving too much from engineering to do this properly.<p>The acquisition hiring in big tech is wild to me. And the consolidation of power into a few companies continues.
Google is making a huge mistake. They are clearly getting scammed, the price is up to $32B from $23B less than a year ago.<p>There is no pressure or need to buy Wiz.
I believe that ‘cloud-neutral’ companies like Wiz must ensure their neutral positioning in order to gain support from various cloud providers. I strongly doubt the willingness of cloud providers like AWS and Azure to cooperate in the future. Google is not only making a major business gamble but also testing the waters in terms of antitrust and judicial challenges.
Proof you don't need to own the .com domain name to make it big?:<p><a href="http://wiz.com/" rel="nofollow">http://wiz.com/</a>
I believe this is actually the second time google has tried to buy this company too. They had to give them a too good to refuse offer.<p>While it seems like we aren't getting a ton of people who have used the product in the comments. I can tell you it checks a lot of boxes to make people sleep better at night with customer data in the cloud.
Is there lock-in for Wiz customers, besides the quality of the product? I understand the crazy revenue growth, fastest to 100m ARR, but surely this needs to saturate. Maybe half the fortune 500 use Wiz,but can you imagine 100% or even 80%? Who are their competitors?
In the meantime, the products that people used to use are decaying. Just today I found out that clicking on the departure date, and viewing the round-trip prices, then changing the departure date is broken in Google Flights. When Pichai leaves, it will be too late.
What changed from last year? The deal that failed?<p>The article says:<p>> The price tag is much higher than the roughly $23 billion Google had offered for Wiz last year before antitrust worries forced the startup to shelve the deal.<p>> Wall Street is optimistic that the Trump administration would drop some antitrust policies<p>Is that it? It's crazy to announce the deal before there's any actual policy changes. Why the rush? It's not like someone is outbidding them here.
Why? I have a hard time believing the engineer at Google see Wiz as innovative. The front page of Wiz.io reads like a bunch of sales bullshit. I built a security posture dashboard for a competitor and I would not say it's worth anywhere near 1b. Is Google such shit now that runtime scanning in a k8 cluster is worth billions?
Does this mean the Wiz app is now going to include free person category filters for their security cameras? Instead of constantly asking you to subscribe
Seems like an answer to everyone blaming Firebase,AWS, and other cloud providers for not forcing them to do basic security checks<p>Wiz will do it.<p>Always happy to see a good exit, good show.<p>I've worked with cloud for a long time. I sorta blame myself for not seeing the market for this and not starting up my own company. I was too busy messing with machine learning, but never going much beyond sentiment analysis. Had I also stayed on that path, and maybe had a few million dollars in startup Capital laying around I'd be a billionaire by now ( yes this is hyperbole).<p>Oh well, time to cry myself asleep as a forever middle class software engineer...
I went "huh, they're buying the smart light company from phillips?"
Different wiz.<p>And best of luck to the Wiz folks! Whenever I see Google acquisitions I just wonder how long until they end up in the graveyard listing.
Open money laundering at its finest. Google, a Jewish company, transfers 45x money times ARR to Israel Jews.<p>Google could have built this in-house.<p>While millions and billions struggle this is how you do it at high level.<p>SoonDar goes brrrrrrr.
Sounds like Google is compromised through Trump to me, by paying more ( in kickbacks) to his backers. I don't think this will help Google in any way. In fact it will probably cost it, as it may be seen as 'compromised' by other state actors. Not a good thing especially when you are discussing security on your platform.
Well, crap. Inb4 their cheap and easily hackable bulbs I have integrated to my self-written automation things go to shit.<p>People who haven't forgotten what happened with Revolv remember.
I wonder what level of insight Google will now have in to how AWS, Oracle and Azure’s customers use their cloud. Even just in aggregate I imagine there’s some useful data.
The acquisition of Wiz by Google raises some interesting questions about the future of cloud security. On one hand, it could lead to better integration and innovation in Google Cloud's security offerings. On the other hand, it might concentrate too much power in the hands of a single vendor. It will be interesting to see how this deal affects the competitive landscape and whether other cloud providers will respond with similar acquisitions or partnerships.