Google’s parent company Alphabet is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wizz for around $23 billion. Wall Street Journal report Monday.
If the deal goes through, it would be the tech giant’s largest acquisition ever.
The move comes as Alphabet and other tech companies face increased antitrust scrutiny, and the acquisition could also help the search giant’s push into cloud computing, a key growth driver of its business.
Founded in 2020 by CEO Assaf Rapaport and a few colleagues, Wizz has seen its valuation soar in recent years. The company, which provides cybersecurity software for cloud computing, raised $1 billion earlier this year, at a valuation of $12 billion at the time.
This makes the company one of the few startups outside of the artificial intelligence industry to raise capital at a higher valuation in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Wiz is on track to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 18 months and $350 million in annual recurring revenue by 2023.
The cybersecurity company is backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Wiz’s founders founded the company after selling their first startup, Adallom, to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015. After working for the tech giant for several years, the founders left the company to start Wiz.
Wiz is headquartered in New York with offices in the US and Israel and has partnerships with several major cloud companies, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Google had been taking a fairly conservative approach to acquisitions ahead of its Wiz deal, one of the biggest in recent tech deals.
Google’s biggest deal was buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012. Its second-largest acquisition was another security company, Mandiant, which it bought two years earlier for $5.4 billion.
Google also spent $2.1 billion on Fitbit in 2021, though the deal hit regulatory hurdles after it was announced, and spent $3.2 billion on Nest Labs in 2014. Other acquisitions over the years include YouTube, DoubleClick, Looker and Waze.
Google is currently awaiting a ruling in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit alleging that the company used illegal tactics to strengthen its dominance in internet search. The Justice Department filed a second antitrust lawsuit last year alleging unfair practices in Google’s advertising technology business, but that lawsuit has not yet gone to trial.
With post wire
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