This is the company Google wants to lead global cybersecurity with.

Google is set to buy Wiz, an Israeli cybersecurity startup, for about $23 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. It would be the largest purchase in Google’s history, significantly larger than YouTube ($1.65 billion) and Motorola ($12.5 billion). It’s also four times what the company paid for Mandiant ($5.4 billion).

That’s an astronomical sum. What is it about Wiz that makes it Google’s biggest acquisition yet? Here, we explain their history, what they do, and what Google can expect from this major purchase.

A meteoric rise in four years

Wiz was founded by Assaf Rappaport (CEO), Yinon Kostika (VP of Product), Roy Resnick (VP of Engineering), and Ami Luttwak (CTO). just four years agoIn January 2020, they decided to create a cybersecurity company headquartered in New York City, although most of the technical team is located in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In this short period of time they have created a colossal company, whose Their latest funding round in May 2024 already valued them at around $12 billion.They currently have around $1.9 billion in funding and have around 950 employees.

What do you do? As Wiz explains, they are “reinventing cloud security from the inside out.” How? With a “normalization layer across clouds” — a platform that “enables organizations to quickly identify and mitigate critical risks.” In other words, they work with major cloud infrastructures to provide additional cybersecurity.

And when we talk about the main ones, we can name them all. Wiz cooperates with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud. According to Wiz, Their clients include 40% of Fortune 100 companies.This means that most large companies trust their services with something as important as the cybersecurity of their cloud.

This has also translated into economic revenue. In an interview with Forbes, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport explained that the company’s annual recurring revenue surpassed $100 million in just 18 months. Never before has a software company grown so much in such a short time. But nine months later, they’ve already surpassed $200 million. The latest figures for 2023 show that they have about income $350 million per year.

Its CEO’s idea was to reach 1 billion in sales and explore an IPO. However, it appears Google has crossed him.

A famous team that signed a contract with Microsoft ten years ago.

Rappaport and the three other founders have been working together for much longer than Wiz. Although the startup was founded in 2020, they have been working together since 2012, when they decided to create Adalloma cybersecurity company specializing in Microsoft SharePoint.

It was no coincidence that Microsoft noticed them. In 2015, the Redmond company announced it was buying Adallom for $320 million. This story is familiar to us, since they founded Adallom three years ago.

But we can go back even earlier. Rappaport, Luttwak and Resnick met when they were young and doing their mandatory military service in IsraelThere they distinguished themselves by creating Unit 8200, which specialized in elite reconnaissance.

Israel is a country known for its cybersecurity experts. Not everything belongs to NSO Group, we also have companies like QuaDream, CyberArk, Check Point, Aqua Security and a long list.

In the case of Wiz, his researchers participated in the discovery of many important vulnerabilitiesincluding OMIGOD, ExtraReplica, AttachMe, BigBang or ChaosDB from Microsoft Azure, which have been described as “the worst vulnerability you can imagine.”

Who would you consider a leader in cybersecurity?

Google has been investing in cybersecurity for many years. From the purchase of VirusTotal to Forseeti via Mandiant and Israel’s Siemplify, the Israeli cybersecurity company that Google bought in 2022 for $500 million.

Despite these efforts and the fact that Google has its own cloud platform, it is still unclear whether Google is the market leader in cybersecurity worldwide. Wiz works with leading global companies regardless of their platform, and they have created a tool that is easy to implement.

In an attempt to improve their catalog, Wiz attempted to buy Lacework for about $200 million, but the purchase stalled. There are more competitors in the cybersecurity sector, such as Orca, with whom they have a legal battle for copying their technology.

Big tech companies are looking to strengthen themselves in cybersecurity and cloud computing. In early 2024, Hewlett Packard Enterprise paid $14 billion for Juniper Networks. Chip group Synopsis paid $35 billion for software group Ansys. A $23 billion payout, if confirmed, doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

But Palo Alto Networks is the world leadera Nasqad-listed company with nearly 14,000 employees worldwide. With the acquisition of Wiz, Google will be looking to partner with them. In a world where artificial intelligence and cloud-based processes have become commonplace, offering the best security is becoming increasingly important.

Image | Web Summit

In Hataka | Malaga Wins Google’s Heart: New Cybersecurity Center Is the Culmination of More Than a Decade