Google to buy Wiz for $32B

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/google-agrees-buy-cybersecurity-startup-wiz-32-bln-ft-reports-2025-03-18/

by uncertainrhymes • 1 year ago

608 641 1 year ago

reuters.com

upcoming-sesame• 1 year ago

Looks like they already have the Gemini logo so integration should be simple

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)#/media/File%3A...

jumperabg• 1 year ago

Interesting, could it be that their software is built by Gemini, the acquisition is managed by Gemini, and the Gemini in Google made a $32B deal with the Gemini at Wiz?

sidcool2• 1 year ago

Wow. That's a huge amount for Cybersecurity.

mmaunder2• 1 year ago

Anyone got a sense for where the value is in Wiz? Revenue? IP? Any customers here?

datadrivenangel• 1 year ago

People seem to really enjoy their product, which is very uncommon in the Enterprise Security Tools space.

airstrike3• 1 year ago

Next year's revenue estimated to be $1B, so definitely real money there but that doesn't speak to value... 32.0x is wild

mmaunder2• 1 year ago

Thanks

dhx• 1 year ago

Data for nation state espionage and industrial espionage?

Whoever owns Wiz obtains read only access to large company and government cloud networks. Even in the Wiz outpost model where the scanning engine is deployed into the user's own cloud network, results from scans are sent back to Wiz Cloud, and this includes sensitive information such as "Installed packages, Exposed secrets, Malware detection".[1] For an example real world deployment, GitLab SaaS public documentation expects the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" to be installed in every container.[2] This Wiz software requires highly elevated privileges to a level that the GitLab security risk assessment only briefly describes.[3]

The data Wiz collects on customers appears to allow answering of queries such as:

1. Which containers of government agencies in country X have the xz-utils library installed? Of these containers, what other software is installed alongside? How many of these containers are exposed to the Internet, directly or indirectly?

2. Which government agencies in country X have a publicly exposed service vulnerable to CVE-20xx-xxxx?

3. For top 200 companies, plot the popularity of AWS or Azure service ACME123 over the past 12 months compared to competing Google service ACME456.

Aside from security risks of having sensitive information of entire governments or large organisations hoovered up by Wiz, use of the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" also includes the risk of an incident similar to the failed CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor update of 2024.

The criticisms above are not specific to Wiz. There are many other competing products/services with similarly poor architectures and lack of protection of sensitive IT system information of governments and large organisations.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/architecture/partners/id-prioritize...

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/readiness/-/tree/mast...

[3] https://github.com/wiz-sec/charts/blob/master/wiz-sensor/tem...

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

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.

awill• 1 year ago

But not by tomorrow. Google is trying to pay their way into cloud leadership. Because they can’t catch up organically.

jordanb2• 1 year ago

They're paying mostly for Wiz's customer book, who they will quickly alienate and drive to competitors.

_countzero_5• 1 year ago

Paying $32 billion dollars for a customer book with no network effect is insane

warkdarrior2• 1 year ago

A lot of "holes" are misconfigurations. Not sure how rewriting open source code helps with that.

eitally• 1 year ago

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.

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.

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.

https://cloud.google.com/customers/wiz

mrweasel• 1 year ago

I can't help feel like this will be rolled into GCP and quickly lose support for Azure and AWS and then just die. That's a lot of money to spend to kill off a business.

arccy• 1 year ago

GCP has been doing more multi cloud stuff lately though: Anthos for K8s in other clouds, BigQuery Omni for bigquery in other clouds

ABS4• 1 year ago

that would immediately shed half the value of the company and Google would need to book a huge loss

e.g. half of Fortune 100 use Wiz and I assure you most of them do not use GCP (or do not use only GCP)

summerlight• 1 year ago

I don't think that makes much sense in business. They want to move customers from competitors and as an underdog you need to provide some migration path. You don't get these kind of system integration freely. Provide your service in competitors to smooth their transition path but keep the latest and best features in GCP. This was the idea of k8s.

zoogeny• 1 year ago

I'm slightly baffled by this acquisition but arguing against you actually helps me make some sense of it.

If Google wants to be "the best of the best" at security and some set of potential customers use Wiz as their "best of the best" security, then this is a way to convert those customers to Google.

Consider some org that prioritizes security, like at the board level. They maybe don't really care about the nickel and dime cost of AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP since it comes out to 10s or 100s of millions of opex in the end. What they do care about is the cleanest record possible with respect to security. And Wiz is a key component to their position on security that is communicated to investors - it is a social proof that they are taking security very seriously.

This now becomes a tool for Google when trying to win their business. By degrading the value of Wiz on AWS/Azure/Oracle/Salesforce they are taking away that bullet point on security for a subset of competitors customers. And that may entice some of them to move their entire cloud service to GCP. So whatever revenue they lose on the Wiz side from a dozen or so cancellations they would hope to make up with a few 100 million dollar whales.

I just find it hard to believe that enough whale level cloud compute business will be generated in this way to justify $32b. This is really the best take I have on the acquisition and it feels unsatisfying, as if there is some other decisive information that would provide a justification for such a valuation.

Maybe there is some government mandate coming down the pipeline that isn't very public yet? Some kind of legislation that will force companies to adopt stricter security policies? That could precipitate the kind of changes that would justify this kind of massive valuation.

belter10• 1 year ago

a way for Google to secure a beachhead in half the Fortune 100

If that is their objective, they will fail again, since this is the land of good account management. Being able to call somebody on the phone if required. Something AWS excels on, Microsoft a little bit, while Google is rumored to have humans working there, but they are rarely seen.

scarface_746• 1 year ago

This is such an underrated weakness of Google. When I was working at AWS ProServe, we never even took GCP as a serious competitor. Their customer service, acount management and enterprise sales team was so horrendous it was laughable.

I don’t think we even had talking points about why AWS was better than GCP like we did Azure.

chairmansteve• 1 year ago

Yep. That is top of my list when choosing a cloud provider.

fastest963• 1 year ago

We have a relatively modest commit with GCP, around $1M a year, and have a dedicated account rep who I can contact whenever I need to. In fact, we've had a similar relationship even when we were half the size.

amputect• 1 year ago

Google simply does not have a culture of giving a shit about people's experiences with their product. If you are having a problem you better either have that problem so frequently and severely that it shows up on whatever monitoring system they're using to evaluate release health, or you better get comfortable with it for the long haul.

VirusNewbie3• 1 year ago

I previously worked for a startup that used GCP with a less than 7 figure spend each year and we had no problems talking to people at Google.

VirusNewbie3• 1 year ago

Why do you think some of the largest companies are using GCP though? If there customer support is really that atrocious, what is the explanation?

Thorrez3• 1 year ago

and security (post the Mandiant acquisition)

As a Googler who works in GCP security, security has been a key differentiator for GCP long before the Mandiant acquisition. Google invented BeyondCorp (a primary driver of Zero Trust). Google helped create security keys (U2F, FIDO, Webauthn), and was I think the first major company to adopt them, both for employees, and for consumers. Google was one of the first major companies to offer a bug bounty, in 2010. Google's Project Zero searching for vulnerabilities in other companies'/organizations' software I think was pretty much unprecedented when it was created. Look at the number of times other tech companies get hacked compared to Google. Google got hacked in 2009 by China (I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government). That was a major turning point. Ever since then it's been "never again".

Disclosure: my thoughts are my own.

belter10• 1 year ago

Look at the number of times other tech companies get hacked compared to Google.

Your whole post is confusing Security of the Cloud with Security in the Cloud. And conflating GCP with Google but those are just examples of why GCP has such a small market percentage.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

To me, the security posture of Android (esp, the Pixels) & Chromium stands out as an outstanding contribution to humanity (given the reach of both those platforms).

Google got hacked in 2009 by China (I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government).

Do they mind if they're legally "hacked" by a (Western) govt? All that security sophistication couldn't prevent LEAs from owning us all, unfortunately: https://therecord.media/google-refuses-to-deny-it-received-u... / https://archive.vn/mzZtI

jopsen• 1 year ago

Having previously used AWS, I would also say that GCP IAM is much better.

Yes, it's a lot less flexible than AWS IAM, but complicated IAM policies with conditions and stuff can be really hard to reason about.

Disclosure: my thoughts are my own.

karencarits• 1 year ago

I think this is also a good argument for why it is beneficial for society that Chrome stays in Alphabet; Google is good at some things and bad at some things - that people have access to a reasonably safe browser for free should not be underestimated

eranation3• 1 year ago

Adding to it: deps.dev, osv.dev, SLSA (all are either free or fully open source) Google has been great contributor to the AppSec and Software Supply Chain community. I just pray daily that the “google graveyard” curse doesn’t touch these important projects.

shalmanese• 1 year ago

(I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government). That was a major turning point. Ever since then it's been "never again".

There was one other time Google was hacked by a major government that also spurred massive internal security posture changes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect#Tech_industry

ExoticPearTree9• 1 year ago

As a GCP user, my view is that Google does Googly things and hopes others will use them. And if not enough people don’t buy into whatever Google builds because it is built by Google, they will cancel it.

underdeserver3• 1 year ago

These are all Google things. How do I benefit from them as a GCP customer?

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

Even before the Mandiant acquisition they integrated Chronicle into Cloud. It's clear that they were focusing on security very early on.

CannoloBlahnik• 1 year ago

Nobody Beats the Wiz is great, but $32B is so much money.

LgLasagnaModel• 1 year ago

Could have gotten a better deal for Crazy Eddie

buildsjets• 1 year ago

The Craziest part about Eddie was his business plan. Steal from your own company for 10 years, take the company public, gradually reduce your stealing over the course of 5 years to show a rapidly increasing profit margin, sell company to a hedge fund and cash out the profit. Then, go to jail for 8 years.

https://www.financialpipeline.com/financial-scams-the-too-cr...

whitepoplar• 1 year ago

Can anyone with security expertise clarify what Wiz actually does? Is it a legitimate company or is it fuzzy consultingware?

itscrush2• 1 year ago

Wiz uses various API's via read access in your accounts/orgs/subscriptions to assess risk of configuration.

They also snapshot your disks, cloning them to Wiz accounts to provide secrets scanning / vuln scanning / etc against your infra.

These resulting risks / findings are scored and provided in their SAAS Wiz console via dashboards / APIs / integrations with remediation guidance.

xorcist• 1 year ago

They also snapshot your disks, cloning them to Wiz accounts

I can see how that could be worth $32B.

shakna• 1 year ago

They were the one's to first report on DeepSeek's recent data leak, and they've found a few others.

One exploit I remember Wiz finding was "ChaosDB". A flaw in Microsoft's Cosmos DB allowed anyone to use the default-enabled Jupyter Notebook to basically dump and modify anyone's databases, without authentication. Full admin access.

InkCanon5• 1 year ago

Would also be interested in this. I don't know anyone who uses Wiz. Google says they had 350 million in revenue last year, aiming for 1 billion this year. So 100x revenue TTM. Crazy stuff.

airstrike3• 1 year ago

FYI we don't really value companies on a TTM basis so 32.0x Revenue would be the right multiple to quote

stego-tech2• 1 year ago

That's because A) big companies that use it don't really like bragging about their security tooling, lest it be used to better profile their infrastructure by attackers, and B) it's basically enterprise-only and insanely expensive.

Source: worked for a large enterprise company that used it, and I loved it. Phenomenal tool, will be a shame to see it die (or at least its non-GCP aspects wither and die) under Alphabet's ownership.

jerrygenser• 1 year ago

Basically give it read access to your cloud account, and it will scan all of the resources to identify potential miss-configurations. Identifying CVE in software is one thing, but it's identifying incorrectly configured resources that would otherwise be secure can dramatically reduce the risk surface.

A lot of cloud providers already have little hints like "hey - did you mean to create this account in God mode?" or "It is recommended not to create this god mode json key file" - Wiz is taking this to the next level of detail

marcus0x6212• 1 year ago

It is a very legitimate tool. It identifies misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in cloud deployments. Anything from a container with a known-vulnerable package in the manifest to a workload with improper firewall rules.

mattfrommars• 1 year ago

Isn't this what tool like MEND or Black Duck (formerly Synopses)?

stego-tech2• 1 year ago

It’s a security-as-a-service platform that monitors whatever clouds or systems you plug into it for security vulnerabilities, but is built specifically for public cloud service providers and their workloads. I quite liked the product, as it would notify my team of erroneous configurations, outdated AMIs, exposed ports, vulnerable workloads, and whatever custom policies we setup (e.g., SSH open between VPCs in AWS, rather than via a Jumpbox).

I loved the product when I used it (huge improvement over Nessus), and am immensely disappointed Google owns it as it means I’ll have to find something else going forward. This is the sort of acquisition a regulator should block, because Wiz really is best-in-class at what they do for every cloud they support, and customers benefit more from it being agnostic.

wil421• 1 year ago

My last company used it to complement other cloud security scanning products. It’s probably a bit of an understatement to call it a scanning tool. It was easy to integrate with our other systems so we could assign vulns to different teams.

aswerty• 1 year ago

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?

InkCanon5• 1 year ago

~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

shmatt• 1 year ago

yes, every 8200 founder i know already has the next product ready to launch in alpha the day after the time limit on their previous acquisition runs out

rvnx2• 1 year ago

Not sure if it's a very wise move to hire foreign intelligence offers and give them access to the core of your tech products and to the customers data.

myth_drannon3• 1 year ago

only 2 out of 3 are 8200 alumni.

drcongo• 1 year ago

That's a lot of speed.

amazingamazing• 1 year ago

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)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034

That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

scarface_746• 1 year ago

The difference is that Google is the worse product company among the big tech companies. It’s like the modern day Yahoo! - where acquisitions go to die.

apercu• 1 year ago

I don't know man, iPhones and Macs are really buggy, bloated/full of unnecessary features, and user hostile. Microsoft products are also hot garbage. The cars we get to pay tens of thousands (or even hundreds) are pretty much garbage now. It's not just Google.

jordanb2• 1 year ago

Turns out McKinsey is really bad at business and letting a McKinsey ghoul run your company is a good way to run it into the ground.

jtgverde• 1 year ago

GOOG is up ~152% since Sundar took over...

underdeserver3• 1 year ago

What do you know, Assaf Rappaport also worked at McKinsey.

ebiester• 1 year ago

This is meant to be politically-neutral commentary: this deal doesn't happen without a Republican in office that will squash the antitrust bent that the Biden administration started.

It's also possible the last Wiz deal happens without the antitrust swirling over Google.

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

Depends on how many complements Google gives the emperor on his clothes. The DOJ reiterated selling off chrome last week, so it's not off the table.

walterbell3• 1 year ago

Some policy is being continued, https://natlawreview.com/article/antitrust-under-trump-initi...

FTC Chairman Ferguson and Omeed Assefi, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, announced on February 18, 2025, that the FTC and DOJ will continue to use the 2023 Merger Guidelines as the framework for their merger review process.

SJC_Hacker2• 1 year ago

Rump likes to play favorites and use any power at his disposal to hurt his political / personal enemies or people he thinks don't "respect" him enough. He also is a fan of extorting people.

So I wouldn't count on it based on some generic "pro-business" position. Google is going to have to kiss the ring one way or another.

zifpanachr238• 1 year ago

I just don't think the anti trust case is as strong in the security industry vs. many other parts of the software industry. I don't think a Biden admin would necessarily have jumped to try and block this sort of acquisition either.

kats4• 1 year ago

Yeah, but Instagram and WhatsApp have billions of users. Everybody has heard of them. Advertising on Instagram generates revenue.

Wiz is a SaaS b2b startup. Even on a forum for startups most people haven't heard of them.

Wiz reportedly has a revenue of 750m. It would take Google 30 years or more to break even on this deal. But like all bs startups Wiz will fade into irrelevancy 6 months after being acquired.

Google is getting completely scammed.

totallyunknown• 1 year ago

This: "But like all bs startups Wiz will fade into irrelevancy 6 months after being acquire"

nosefrog• 1 year ago

Nobody thought Instagram and WhatsApp were good acquisitions at the time.

askafriend• 1 year ago

Instagram was roughly 10 people when it got bought, had less than 30M users and $0 in revenue.

Klaster_1• 1 year ago

Kinda confusing given Wiz is also a Google internal frontend framework.

azangru• 1 year ago

They want more wizes

ceva• 1 year ago

big tech should be forbidden of purchasing anything, especially big 5

coldpie2• 1 year ago

The voters disagreed and elected an extremely big tech friendly government.

guappa8• 1 year ago

I'm sure that didn't factor in at all in why the voters voted what they voted.

blitzar• 1 year ago

This represents 32 billion good reasons to build products to serve big techs platforms and customers.

Sherlocking is obviously the risk.

yathaid• 1 year ago

The Trump admin has shown the same attitude as the Biden admin when it comes to mergers. So why do they think the merger will go through this time?

zifpanachr238• 1 year ago

Because the one thing I don't think you can plausibly say about the security software space is that there is a lack of options.

It uniquely seems to be fragmented and messy compared to most other parts of the software industry,(not sure why, just saying what I observe.

So the market situation looks very different to the ones that the DOJ was going after (like Google in ads,if Wiz was a big ad company then maybe the government would be more interested in trying to block it). Wiz isn't even close to having some kind of insurmountably dominant market share in their specific area of expertise either.

kmfrk• 1 year ago

Rejecting a $23B offer to get $32B less than a year later doesn't sound half bad.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/23/24204198/google-wiz-acqui...

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

I was trying to figure out where the deja vu was coming from. This explains it!

dcchambers3• 1 year ago

Google's M&A team: Oops we switched the 2 and 3 on that offer document, let's fix it and try again.

Sohcahtoa823• 1 year ago

Jimmy switched the numbers!

shprd2• 1 year ago

What changed from last year? The deal that failed?

The article says:

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.
Wall Street is optimistic that the Trump administration would drop some antitrust policies

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.

coldpie2• 1 year ago

Did you read the article?

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. ... A harsh regulatory environment in 2024 had made it difficult for many firms to push through large deals, but Wall Street is optimistic that the Trump administration would drop some antitrust policies.

shprd2• 1 year ago

Yes, I made my comment more clear.

ecshafer• 1 year ago

There is a new administration, and the new one doesn't have a DOJ that is extremely anti big tech, and going after them for antitrust on everything.

airstrike3• 1 year ago

Reminder they also bought Mandiant for $5.4B in 2022

colesantiago• 1 year ago

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.

leohonexus• 1 year ago

There's Wazuh, but it's more of an XDR (i.e. anti-virus) and SIEM solution than what Wiz is offering.

https://wazuh.com/ https://github.com/wazuh/wazuh

tnolet2• 1 year ago

For hardcore Wiz users: What are their killer features that you use day in, day out?

aweiher• 1 year ago

We use wiz and rapid7, so I can compare these two:

Usability of Wiz and the ability to adapt it is so much better. Everyone can get a seat without extra costs, enabling shift-left for the dev teams. Projects make sure they only see what they need to see.

The query engine is top. There are very good presets. Create Boards to share custom queries with the teams.

Compliance frameworks are available. You could inspect the rules, they are written in OPA rego and you could add your own rules.

Cloudtrail search is also a lot better than the one aws is providing.

I could go on and on and on .. this solution has so many powerful features.

zifpanachr238• 1 year ago

This was the most detailed and helpful explanation of what exactly the deal is with Wiz I think in this whole comment section.

OccamsMirror• 1 year ago

$32 billion in an all-cash deal,

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.

mjlee• 1 year ago

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.

orliesaurus• 1 year ago

biggest Google acquisition yet or what?

hyperbrainer3• 1 year ago

Yes. The company’s previous biggest deal was its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2012, which it sold two years later for $2.9bn. [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/google-pa...

nashashmi2• 1 year ago

Can’t help but predict that this will be a similar outcome. If they did not have a security division, this acquisition could work. But colliding two heavy security behemoths together is like the collision of two galaxies with a higher enteopy.

xiphias2• 1 year ago

Motorola was bought for patents to defend Android, it was a clear win.

Wiz is much harder to understand.

echelon• 1 year ago

The patents they received from Motorola effectively put an end to Apple's Android witch hunt.

Prior to this acquisition, Apple was determined to sue Android out of existence. They were on a rage-fueled mission to end a product they viewed as a copycat, and they knew Google didn't hold any patents to defend themselves.

When Google acquired Motorola's patents, the tables turned and it was Google that could end Apple or at least turn it into mutually assured destruction.

Those patents alone were worth a hundred billion for the headache they saved Google and the market position they opened up.

This was one of Google's smartest moves of all time.

atonse• 1 year ago

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?

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?

kadomony• 1 year ago

Yes. They became billionaires overnight.

epolanski9• 1 year ago

Acquisitions often involve swaps of shares.

bhouston2• 1 year ago

The press releases say cash deal.

thinkindie• 1 year ago

Otherwise it depends on the deal structure. Especially if it's an acqui-hire, or founders are involved, it can be a combination of shares, options, earn-out, guaranteed bonus, certain salary levels (much higher then their current one) etc etc, and cash. Usually 100% cash deal is the most sought after unless the acquirer has a very solid business (in that case shares and options could be valuable too).

jaimebuelta• 1 year ago

They say that's an all-cash purchase. So it seems that they really put $32bn in the bank account.

bklyn11201• 1 year ago

Ultimately they are buying the shares of all existing shareholders. Wiz tells Google who the shareholders are after all triggers of options to shares are resolved. Then Google wires each shareholder after the signatures are complete. No money should go into Wiz bank account. 10-25% of the cash is held back to make sure the company and key employees fulfill promises made as part of the transaction.

exhibitapp• 1 year ago

In an all cash deal the Vendor (buyer) will purchase all shares of the Target (seller) for cash and cancel those shares. A substantial amount of the cash will be held back in escrow subject to a number of clauses and released at a future date.

This will protect the buyer against misrepresentations.

There are often also targets that have to be met to achieve the full purchase price but not always disclosed

kgermino• 1 year ago

Yes on all of that. All Cash means Google is essentially writing a $32Bn check which is dispersed to the Wiz shareholders. (It wouldn't go to Wiz's bank account since Google owns the bank account once they send the money.

Typically these involve at least some stock (cash + stock or all stock) which would mean that each Wiz share gets some amount of money and some multiple of Google stock per share.

mlyle• 1 year ago

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?

Google pays each of Wiz's shareholders 75-90% of the deal amount. The remainder is held in escrow and paid some time later based on a variety of conditions.

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?

Yup, that's exactly how it works.

financetechbro• 1 year ago

Part of the acquisition process is putting together a “funds flow” which is simply a model that lays out how much $ each shareholder gets and then also you collect all the wire details, etc. But anyway, it can be a bit surreal seeing how much cash will be deposited into various accounts once the deal closes

limaoscarjuliet• 1 year ago

It means if you were a shareholder of Wiz, you will have cash in your checking/savings account within few days and you will no longer have the shares.

timcobb• 1 year ago

What if I don't want to pay capital gains?

xnx• 1 year ago

Is enterprise security software like consumer antivirus software (i.e. unnecessary (or even harmful) if you know what you're doing)?

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

"Enterprise" and "you know what you're doing" don't go hand-in-hand. You might know what you're doing, but does everyone else at your enterprise?

Every single devops person who can push a CL to staging (that may not get properly reviewed)? Every marketing whiz who is using a dataviz tool against a cloud storage bucket you didn't even know existed? Every support engineer who is on-call at 2:#0am and can fix a customer's problem with one tiny IAM change?

zifpanachr238• 1 year ago

I think that is obviously the case.

That being said, one of the reasons these things sell is that the majority of people sitting behind computers in large enterprises absolutely DO NOT have any idea what they were doing.

Once you get to a certain scale, the idea that you can "just be competent" and maintain high standards and configure your boxes the right way the first time every time btecomes logistically impossible.

Liability and insurance also is a big concern for large companies. The ability to blame somebody else for your security failings and check off all the silly boxes is pretty valuable. I'm sure consumer windows antivirus software would become a big hit again if you were for all intents and purposes being legally strong armed into purchasing it.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

Official Wiz post: https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-joining-google

yujzgzc3• 1 year ago

Sometime explain the strategic rationale behind this? Google's previous big acquisition in the cloud space, Looker, didn't exactly pan out.

sjm-lbm• 1 year ago

.. and all the talk of multicloud makes me feel like I'm reading an IBM press release, which is never good.

bhouston2• 1 year ago

I think Google sees a fast growing company and is acquiring it. Many GCP related acquisitions are weird, like Looker, Apogee and are awkward fits. Unsure how this goes.

yujzgzc3• 1 year ago

On top of it this one is an amount that you wouldn't pay if it wasn't existential, and it really doesn't feel like it is.

epolanski9• 1 year ago

What's in for Google?

Like 32B is no small sum, and I don't really understand Wiz business (product yes, business and numbers much less).

fcantournet• 1 year ago

I sounds insane to me number wise too. Even growth stocks have about 5x the price to revenue.

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

Even growth stocks have about 5x the price to revenue.

A PE of 5 is not a growth stock - that’s the kind of PE you’d see on a barely surviving mid-cap in decline…. The combined PE of the S&P500 is in the low to mid 30s these days!

Reasoning• 1 year ago

The cloud computing market is ~$600B annually. Google has a market share of 12% in it while Amazon sits at 30% and Microsoft at 21%. I'm assuming this is Google trying to stay competitive in that market.

epolanski9• 1 year ago

And they gonna get all that cloud needs through Wix?

Even if they did, I just don't see the play.

ergocoder• 1 year ago

I'd bet, with the price tag, Amazon and MS were also looking to buy Wiz. That's why the price looks a bit outrageous.

Founders previously sold their security company to microsoft as well.

nikhizzle• 1 year ago

Perhaps Google is scared about losing its cash cow in search, and is needing to cement their position in cloud compute.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

Google Cloud post:

Google + Wiz: Strengthening Multicloud Security

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/goo...

dmchk• 1 year ago

Gemini cyberattack exploit capabilities about to become better

kats4• 1 year ago

Don't do it!

ChicagoBoy11• 1 year ago

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?

I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.

yen223• 1 year ago

I don't think WhatsApp had the same kind of revenue that Wiz has, even normalised for 2014 numbers.

disgruntledphd24• 1 year ago

Revenue and profit are very different. Like, it's easy to pump revenue at a loss.

I don't really see the benefits of this acquisition for Google, but congrats to the Wiz team!

atemerev4• 1 year ago

WhatsApp purchase was for that sweet sweet data of everyone's contact lists (this was their original innovation for onboarding — just give us access to your phone book and we'll tell you who else is on WhatsApp). Their earnings were completely irrelevant in price discussions. The billions were paid for the dataset.

IshKebab2• 1 year ago

True, but the vast majority of people spend zero money on WhatsApp. I actually have no idea how I would give them money. There are no adverts, the metadata is not valuable, and no companies even use WhatsApp business, at least in the UK. Their UK revenue is basically 0, despite 100% market share.

This is an enterprise product in a space where companies spend millions of dollars.

Still seems like an insane amount though.

quantumwannabe• 1 year ago

Whatsapp when it was acquired cost $1/year (with a year long free trial) and had a billion users and 55 employees. They were printing money.

zck2• 1 year ago

Just to respond to the Whatsapp part of the comment, apparently Whatsapp made about $1.7 billion in 2024. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/whatsapp-statistics/

guappa8• 1 year ago

Like for whatsapp, they're buying the database, not the product.

zck2• 1 year ago

Whatsapp was $1/person/year for a license. Wiz is "contact sales for pricing". Presumably that's more than $1/year.

According to Amazon's Wiz integration (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ibgbkrqusncsm), the lowest cost they have is $24,000/year.

craigkilgo• 1 year ago

It's based on your workload you are using it for basically. So its not a set price.

seanhunter• 1 year ago

Valuation multiples for a free direct to consumer messaging company are very different to a paid-for b2b cybersecurity company. It doesn't really matter whether you've heard about Wiz, the important thing is every CISO has heard of it and many of them are prepared to pay actual money for the product.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

Wiz is enterprise software aimed at and popular with large companies that need to check all the compliancy boxes, and according to sources used by >40% of the Fortune 500 companies. It's also only 5 years old, so that's a ridiculously fast growth.

securingsincity• 1 year ago

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.

_countzero_5• 1 year ago

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.

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.

InkCanon5• 1 year ago

There is actually some drama between Wiz and Orca, a company founded one year before Wiz. Orca alleged Wiz copied them, and Orca does operate in the same space. But a lot of hundred billion dollar companies are built on moats, integration and switching costs.

_countzero_5• 1 year ago

Yeah but Google is a trillion dollar company. Why do they need to spend $32billion on a company whose only value add seems to be they are good at finding exploits? You could hire every cyber security researcher in the country for $32billion.

thiago_fm2• 1 year ago

What Wiz/Orca did is easy to copy for any Cloud security company with enough money, there's no moat.

What is hard about that is actually selling your product to customers, which Wiz managed to do in a way never seen before.

mattlutze2• 1 year ago

For $32B Google are buying Wiz's brand, existing customers and their pipeline of customers, along with the technology.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

This is the answer, Wiz already has a foot in the door / running contracts with huge cloud consumers, but not all of them are using Google's cloud. I wonder if Google tries to earn more money off of competing cloud platforms by offering services like this.

kats4• 1 year ago

Wiz has no brand, no one knows who they are.

Revenue from Wiz's customers will not make back $32 billion dollars even in 30 years.

Wiz's technology is irrelevant. I think Google already scans for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. And can build similar for low millions of dollars.

ponty_rick2• 1 year ago

The issue is a lot of customers are going to run away from Wiz now, due to all the Google uncertainty.

thfuran• 1 year ago

If they want the customers, they should have to compete for them. Google shouldn't be allowed to acquire any companies. They're already huge.

Marsymars2• 1 year ago

You could hire several thousand best in class engineers

How easy is this? Especially if you're doing it on an accelerated timeline, it seems like you'd have to pay above market to poach thousands of best-in-class engineers, and then you're stuck with higher salary expenses forever.

more_corn2• 1 year ago

Google already employs some of the best software engineers in the world. In fact they’ve been laying off thousands of them. Google, like most big companies struggles to innovate because succeeding at a big company and making something fresh and new are different and often mutually exclusive skills. If they could have built it themselves they would have.

jckrichabdkejdb• 1 year ago

Could've bought reddit with the same amount.

_countzero_5• 1 year ago

Yeah, does WIZ just have a pile of 0 days that they are sitting on? Or a bunch of data stolen from various cloud providers. This is an extremely weird and suspicious acquisition imo.

film423• 1 year ago

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.

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 just cheap enough to over come the switching cost.

byteknight• 1 year ago

How on earth does buying Wiz force other developers to move? I think the tinfoil is too tight.

disgruntledphd24• 1 year ago

There's no force but Google can now leverage the data from Wiz to target good customers for other services.

stevenAthompson2• 1 year ago

It doesn't force them to move, it just gets Google the information about how you use competitors products so they can out negotiate them come deal time.

stackskipton• 1 year ago

Wiz itself doesn’t. But Wiz knows what is going on in everyone cloud. That data could be fed to GCP sales team though customers might riot if that happens.

acdha• 1 year ago

They don’t need to force people, just make them a very good targeted offer. This is also great for seeing which features their customers use most to help GCP catch up to the competition, too.

neom2• 1 year ago

If you'd be so kind for those of us that haven't touched cloud in 5/10 years, what is Wiz? from reading the google announcement: solving the supply chain hybrid cloud security issues? I could google I know but you seem to know what you are talking about, so if you'd be so kind. :)

SSLy2• 1 year ago

it's a linter for your yaml spaghetti

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

I thought they made smart lightbulbs (I have some "WiZ" ones installed in fact).

Atotalnoob3• 1 year ago

When you use a cloud provider to setup a VM, what policies do you apply to it in order to ensure it’s secure?

Wiz and other tools in the same space tell you and tracks compliance across your fleet.

Idk if wiz does this, but their competitors have “compliance packs” which are preset compliance patterns, IE hipaa, finra, etc.

That way you click a button and it tells you every change you need to make to be compliant

Edit: this is all just examples

swyx• 1 year ago

thank you for asking on behalf of the many of us who are in the same boat.

rakkhi• 1 year ago

If you don't mind a short blog post I run though the capabilities of something like Wiz: https://rakkhi.substack.com/p/choosing-the-best-cloud-native...

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

But also, and may more important, you get to see everyones cloud usage, across all providers

Yeah - that’s not likely to happen. Even the current in-house developed multi-cloud security stuff Google has doesn’t let internal people see customer data. It’s right there in the T&Cs they publish and agree to.

I suppose they could be violating them in egregious ways, but that wouldn’t last long before one or more of the 170,000 employees got upset and went all whistleblower, which would lead to billions of dollars in lawsuits.

devsda• 1 year ago

There are ways around it. If they look into specific customer's usage it is looking at customer data. If they look at more customers it will just be called anonymous analytics.

Then you slice and dice the analytics data to extract what you need in the name of planning & improving the product.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

They wanted it to happen last year, but Wiz wasn't sure yet whether they would want to go public instead.

yujzgzc3• 1 year ago

For a truly multi cloud customer, your second point switches from being a pro to being a con as soon as Google owns it. Why would you give one of your cloud vendors visibility over your footprint across their competition?

theamk2• 1 year ago

It's pro for Google, not pro for customers.

alberth2• 1 year ago

So is Wiz just a CASB?

(Cloud Access Security Broker)

warkdarrior2• 1 year ago

Wiz is a CNAPP provider. (Cloud Native App Protection Platform)

light_triad• 1 year ago

It was going to happen last year but Wiz said they wanted to IPO. Wonder what that implies about the larger IPO/exits market.

Here's the letter sent by the CEO Assaf Rappaport to his team at the time (2024):

"Wizards,

I know the last week has been intense, with the buzz about a potential acquisition. While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz.

Let me cut to the chase: our next milestones are $1 billion in ARR and an IPO.

Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/22/wiz-walks-away-from-google...

otterley8• 1 year ago

A lot has happened in the last 56 days that has resulted in significant uncertainty in the stock markets. That, combined with the higher offer, apparently changed the board's mind.

film423• 1 year ago

Wiz by itself is a great business and public markets will price it accordingly, but Google is able to price it much higher because of its unique position. Wiz + GCP sales team will boost adoption of the main product, a Google branded security tool keeps eyes from looking out, and of course, the ability to move huge amounts of revenue from competitors over to GCP is something only a hyper-scaler can tap. At 36x+ valuation, this is still a great deal for Google.

dehrmann2• 1 year ago

Wonder what that implies about the larger IPO/exits market

The window is closed and locked. Haven't closed the storm shutters yet.

varjag• 1 year ago

LOL IPO market is dead for observable future.

belter10• 1 year ago

If you know the Cloud market you know nobody is moving to GCP :-)

archsyscall• 1 year ago

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

kamranjon• 1 year ago

I’m just curious if anyone here has actually heard of this company before this announcement? If you have, what is your opinion on this acquisition?

sudo-i2• 1 year ago

Growing up in the NYC area this is what I think of when someone says the wiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz_(store)

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

I have 'wiz' lights in my place - home-networked lighting system. Which works. Well. For me....so glad g hasn't acquired them.

TuringNYC• 1 year ago

> Growing up in the NYC area this is what I think of when someone says the wiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz_(store)

Growing up in NYC, it is was impossible to not remember the "Nobody Beats the Wiz" jingle

sundarurfriend• 1 year ago

As a fan of British comedy, this is what I think of when I hear wiz: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiz#Etymology_2

kyawzazaw2• 1 year ago

didn't they try to do this several months ago?

popol1991• 1 year ago

They are huge in the cybersecurity space, led by veteran founders, solve real problems, fastest growth to $100M ARR in the history...

mi_lk• 1 year ago

In cybersecurity history or the history?

tnolet2• 1 year ago

Last Kubecon / Cloudnative Con they had a HUGE stand. Hard to miss them if you are in this space.

mousetree• 1 year ago

We've been using them for 2-3 years. Excellent.

isoprophlex2• 1 year ago

[narrator]: Excellent, until now! Soon, their beloved cloud infra security scanner will to be sucked dry of all the juicy usage data on AWS and Azure customers, bled of its innovation, to be discarded in a few years time...

I like it too. Don't care much for google buying them, it can only end badly.

psanford• 1 year ago

I've used wiz in a previous job. Its a good product. I don't know if they invented disk snapshot based security scanning, but they certainly popularized it.

Companies like CrowdStrike have copied a lot of what Wiz has been doing (and I'm sure wiz has copied some CrowdStrike features).

This announcement is pretty disappointing to me. I would have more faith in Wiz as an independent company than as part of Google. I expect their innovation to fall off a cliff.

fdgjgbdfhgb• 1 year ago

I've seen them at trade shows and heard good things. I had also heard that Google tried buying them last year but it didn't go through, I'm curious about how/why they did it now

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

What I read is that last year they weren't sure yet if they wanted to go public instead, but the current financial climate isn't good for going public so they went for an acquisition instead.

ang_cire• 1 year ago

Almost any infosec professional whose company uses an IaaS provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc) has heard of them. They are probably the most notable tool for assessing your "Cloud Security Posture". It basically looks at your cloud configuration and alerts you for security issues caused by mis/sub-optimal configurations. It also identifies vulnerabilities, software updates, permissions issues, etc.

I'm sad they're being acquired, especially by a FAANG company. This constant consolidation is bad for IT (and the economy in general). I am happy for the employees holding shares though!

dcchambers3• 1 year ago

Yes. We use them for container vulnerability scanning - maybe other things as well.

sudo-i2• 1 year ago

Guess this is what laying off thousands of people paid for.

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

Stock is down, definitely overpaid

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

the entire market is down today, tech especially

mattlutze2• 1 year ago

I was wondering why like every Wiz business development person was cold-engaging me on LinkedIn and email last year.

thiago_fm2• 1 year ago

Here's some context in what this means:

Currently, Crowdstrike, Zscaler and other solutions compete in a similar space than Wiz.

Google likely believes if can offer Wiz sec products bundled with Google Cloud. It isn't a terrible idea.

But Wiz itself works on multiple clouds, so it seems that Google can also grow it on their own.

Cloud security companies are growing a lot, and might be a growth lever for Alphabet, as its other businesses' revenue growth are slowing down.

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.

For me, it looks overpriced. Wiz has been growing a lot, but under Alphabet it might not perform as well as it did.

The big winners are the founders and whoever owned Wiz options.

alephnerd9• 1 year ago

Zscaler isn't a prominent player in the CNAPP space - they missed the ball on that, but they also didn't need to tbh.

ZS specializes in SSE/SASE - and does really well in that segment.

siva7• 1 year ago

They didn't want to buy Github.. too expensive. But Wiz price tag makes sense to them?

walterbell3• 1 year ago

Customer feedback (2024), https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1c1s9r2/wiz_...

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.

VC approach to enterprise sales, https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042462

[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.

g8oz• 1 year ago

Isn't this a roundabout kickback scheme?

walterbell3• 1 year ago

Discussed last year in the linked HN subthread.

xyst• 1 year ago

What the hell is "Wiz"? Some nobody company that was formed <5 yrs ago and now gets acquired for _$32B_

G might be the modern day IBM.

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.

The acquisition hiring in big tech is wild to me. And the consolidation of power into a few companies continues.

alephnerd9• 1 year ago

What the hell is "Wiz"

Just because your ignorant about significant portions of the tech industry doesn't mean you need to be dismissive.

kernal• 1 year ago

I hear the Internet is on computers now.

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

Some nobody company

That was the fastest to $100m ARR in history

Some nobody company

That was a Decacorn ~3yrs after its founding

Some nobody company

With ~half of the Fortune 100 as paying customers.

I get it - most people here aren’t in cybersecurity, nor do they understand the space, but let me put it this way - if you are looking for the top 5 cybersecurity companies by mindshare of people in the industry, Wiz is in the conversation.

0x500x79• 1 year ago

Agree with most of your points, the one correction (that I think is important) is that they were the fastest from 1M ARR - 100M ARR. Not a straight fastest to 100M.

rexreed2• 1 year ago

It doesn't hurt to be brib...incentivizing the F1000 CISOs (not my words, see article) : https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc

"The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund. Although it may be considered "small money", the jumps between the first stages of fundraising are the most difficult. “Until a ‘regular’ startup company reaches sales of $2-10 million it grinds itself to a pulp, but with Gili Ra'anan, this happens in the first year of sales. He creates a mechanism that is difficult to compete against because his companies immediately jump to a valuation of $100-200 million, raise more money, and then also have more resources to compete later,” a partner in an Israeli venture capital fund tells Calcalist. “With a seemingly small purchase of $100,000-$200,000, a CISO increases a startup's value by dozens of times.”"

...

"I recruited a new CISO for a financial organization that I managed out of a desire to refresh the cyber defense system. I gave him a free hand because I trusted him and I see this position as a position of trust. Six months later, I noticed that, surprisingly, almost all of the new logos that the CISO introduced were portfolio companies of Cyberstarts [Of which Wiz is their most notable]," describes a former senior executive at a large financial institution in the U.S. "It's not that these were necessarily bad solutions, but that some of them were a very low priority for us or solved problems that were not particularly urgent. After I confronted the CISO on the subject, he admitted that he is on the list of advisers of Cyberstarts and receives a percentage of the funds from them. Shortly after this, he left the company and immediately upon the appointment of a new CISO, I asked him to inform me if he was contacted by Cyberstarts. Within a few weeks, he had already received an email from them with a description of their kind of 'loyalty program' that details exactly what he will receive the more he works with the fund."

dboreham• 1 year ago

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..

spaintech• 1 year ago

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

Fokamul• 1 year ago

RIP Wiz team.

jb1991• 1 year ago

Would be cool if they call the new product G-Wiz.

nahimn• 1 year ago

under rated dad joke. 10/10

purple_ferret• 1 year ago

Proof you don't need to own the .com domain name to make it big?:

http://wiz.com/

SSLy2• 1 year ago

`.io` is `.com` equivalent for the market it addresses.

1024core• 1 year ago

Didn't Google acquire another cloud security outfit called Mandiant sometime back? How is this different from that?

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

another cloud security outfit called Mandiant sometime back

Mandiant wasn't/isn't "cloud security" - they're primarily security research, threat intel, and incident response. Completely different space, customer base, and product set.

leftcenterright2• 1 year ago

I still find it amazing that:

- Businesses pay the cloud providers to allow them to use compute/disk/network

- Businesses pay to hire the engineers who can work on cloud

- Businesses pay to hire security engineers who can secure the applications in cloud

- Businesses pay to hire FinOps to optimize their cloud usage

- Businesses hire security companies to secure their cloud usage (e.g. Wiz was one such company)

- Now cloud provider has to acquire the security company to secure their own cloud?

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.

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

- Now cloud provider has to acquire the security company to secure their own cloud?

No - this acquisition is about selling Wiz to cloud customers. Deploying on cloud securely is a solved problem if you set and follow good policies. Virtually nobody is doing this, ergo companies like Wiz that will tell you when you're doing something stupid.

leftcenterright2• 1 year ago

if you set and follow good policies

Is it really that hard? like I listed out, it is definitely not cheap. There isn't a shortage of skilled engineers in IT after massive layoffs. What's the catch then?

czk2• 1 year ago

Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors
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
Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all of whom previously founded Adallom.
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.
Adallom was reportedly acquired by Microsoft for $320 million in July 2015
On March 18, 2025, Google announced an all-cash acquisition of Wiz for $32 billion

Had never heard of Wiz until they posted the blog post about the DeepSeek database being public earlier this year.

https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepse...

coliveira2• 1 year ago

These companies are the closest you can get to a legal mafia, they are effectively charging companies around the world to keep them "safe". In other words, a job that is traditionally considered to be a basic service of the government is now being privatized by people that nobody knows if we can really trust.

culanuchachamim• 1 year ago

Big difference

The mafia charges protection from itself, here the bad actors are out there and wiz help you protect from them.

Wiz selling doors with appropriate locks for your bussines.

marcus0x6212• 1 year ago

This is an absurd take. There’s nothing stopping anyone from building their own cloud security tools (many have), and unlike the Mafia, Wiz isn’t threatening anyone who doesn’t buy their service. I’m also not aware of any government agency providing any reasonable analog to what these tools provide in the physical world.

fourseventy• 1 year ago

1.) What

biggc• 1 year ago

You’re stretching here.

Companies hire private physical security all the time. Why is digital security different?

ixsploit• 1 year ago

There are other CNAPP solutions. If you do an evaluation you will see why WIZ comes out on top.

blackhawkC172• 1 year ago

In other words, a job that is traditionally considered to be a basic service of the government is now being privatized by people that nobody knows if we can really trust.

How on earth is it the government's job to protect people's software? It's a mere digital product, not human life or property.

Besides, people also buy padlocks and door locks for safety. Wiz is no different.

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

It would only be like the Mafia if they launched cyber attacks against your infra if you turned down their services.

Do you think that's what they do?

Suppafly• 1 year ago

I do wonder how long it'll be until we uncover some scandal showing that the security companies are also the ones creating exploits.

detourdog• 1 year ago

I never heard of them until they were purchased for $32 billion.

debarshri5• 1 year ago

Thats the kind of a company everyone wants to build in enterprise security.

Incognito unicorns.

There are many companies like these in security space. Another company I can think of is Rubrik. All these large security companies under the radar success.

tzury2• 1 year ago

$350M ARR in less than 5 years. Aiming towards $1B by the end of 2025.

You never heard of them since perhaps your decisions were not in the cycles of their product. Those who are , heard indeed (type of folks who look at Gartner magic quadrants).

kyawzazaw2• 1 year ago

You didn't hear about them last time on HN, when it was $23 billion?

x3n0ph3n3• 1 year ago

My company just started using them and I was part of the due dilligence evaluation of their product. I had never been so impressed with a cloud security provider before I started using their product. Absolutely phenomenal product offering l.

ryanSrich5• 1 year ago

This is wild to me. As someone in security, Wiz is definitely one of the whales.

belter10• 1 year ago

It does not make sense. In 2024 Wiz had 10.7% market share. Revenue in the 1,5 to 1,7 Billion but they were not profitable in 2023. Become profitable in 2024 meaning costs are very high.

Also looks like Google is desperate for growth in Cloud and they need to do something.

They are paying as much money as their whole Google Cloud revenue in 2023. Revenue multiple is like 40x times revenue for Wiz. Exceptionally high, even for a high-growth company. Clearly overpaying.

Wiz had nine rounds so massive dilution, and VCs need to recover the money...

username135• 1 year ago

In cash!

zifpanachr238• 1 year ago

I read their website and there must be something secret they've got cooking behind the scenes cause the valuation makes zero sense to me.

The whole thing reads like all the dozen or so "cloud security" plays out there.

Either I'm missing something big, or their products are outrageously far ahead of all the other similar sounding products out there.

I've been known to roll my eyes at a lot of these sorts of product catalogues in the past though and so I'm definitely biased and not the target audience for their marketing.

Some CIO out there probably really does think that their security problems will finally be over once they purchase another half dozen dashboards click through and look at.

ExoticPearTree9• 1 year ago

We use them and the product is very very nice and very lightweight to set up. Like for a cloud environment it takes about 5 minutes to get it up and running for a tenant.

They add features weekly or faster.

hristov• 1 year ago

Looks like a payoff to me.

layoric• 1 year ago

I swear some tech company acquisitions appear like more expensive art purchases for for when you need to launder larger amounts of money...

Rodmine• 1 year ago

You are on to something. It is a company of the chosen.

Nexxxeh• 1 year ago

When I read the headline, I assumed the IoT platform and smart light brand, the now Wi-Fi arm of Signify, the smart home people who do (Philips) Hue smart lighting.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-gb

badc0ffee• 1 year ago

This is the logo I envision in my head when hearing Wiz.

admiralrohan• 1 year ago

I am hearing for first time, I thought Google is buying Wix the website builder and was thinking why!

belter10• 1 year ago

Guess what is common between Wix and Wiz....

brightball• 1 year ago

Didn’t Palo Alto Networks come out of 8200 too?

marcus0x6212• 1 year ago

The primary founder (Nir Zuk) is a Unit 8200 alumni, as are the founders of Checkpoint and a bunch of other cyber security companies. Nir Zuk is also a US citizen and went out of his way to base PANW in the US, including their hardware manufacturing and software engineering operations.

You'll find former-intelligence blob operators in a great many cyber security companies. Including former American intel employees[0]. Hell, the CIA basically has their own VC fund[1].

Also, there is zero evidence any of these people are currently acting at the behest of their former employers, apart from obviously the CIA venture fund acts at the behest of the CIA.

0 - Robert M Lee https://dragos.com, Keith Alexander (formerly https://ironnet.com,) amongst many others

1 - In Q Tel https://www.iqt.org/

DeathArrow2• 1 year ago

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.

It's interesting that many people working in intelligence found ways to become very successful in business. I wonder what is the reason.

rubenvanwyk• 1 year ago

Intelligence communities tend to pick very smart people who are particularly good at acquiring niche skills and operating under extreme situational uncertainty. I think those are valuable attributes for someone in business.

CokeFaultSoyuz• 1 year ago

Blackmail

Adverblessly• 1 year ago

Military service in Israel is mandatory and the conscription rate in the core "educated" areas is ~90%. Each year, the intelligence corps then gets what is practically* first pick of the best minds of that year (typically kids who are already skilled in programing). They then get to have them for 4-6 years meaning unlike modern employers, they have time and motivation to invest in training them. Then you get the most apt programming minds of a generation spending six years together learning and building connections with each other in core programming and security skills.

Imagine if all the ivy league graduates in the US would be forced to work together for the same company, for free, for 4-6 years. Would you be surprised if suddenly former employees of that company found ways to become very successful in business?

* - Technically they get something like 3rd pick and there's negotiations and it depends on what sort of roles are involved etc. In practice, conscripts have some influence on where they'll go and if you have a choice in any role in the military, you are going to pick "write code in an air-conditioned office" over any other available option.

pbiggar2• 1 year ago

Tight networks largely. THey've invested heavily into having these "assets" in US tech companies, and so pro-Israel folks in the US work hard to acquire them in.

See [1] to see the flow of people. I explain the connections a lot in [2], and [3] is our initiative to work on it.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DAYsSPxpHFP/?img_index=1

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxvaembyMcQ&list=PLjHqnRFDnc...

[3] https://www.ethics.vc/get-involved

elAhmo3• 1 year ago

Network

999900000999• 1 year ago

Seems like an answer to everyone blaming Firebase,AWS, and other cloud providers for not forcing them to do basic security checks

Wiz will do it.

Always happy to see a good exit, good show.

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).

Oh well, time to cry myself asleep as a forever middle class software engineer...

sidcool2• 1 year ago

Why would Google, a leader in security, spend so much on another security firm? Wiz must have something amazing under their sleeve.

dj_gitmo• 1 year ago

This is just how tech has worked forever. Large established companies are not great at developing new products, so they buy startups. Youtube was a startup. Google Docs was a startup. Hell, Network Address Translation was a startup at one point.

happyopossum9• 1 year ago

a leader in security

Google is arguably a thought leader in security, but from a revenue and customer base standpoint? Not even close.

codingmoney• 1 year ago

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.

Yasuraka• 1 year ago

This reeks of GPT.

bitsandboots• 1 year ago

I went "huh, they're buying the smart light company from phillips?" Different wiz.

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.

gnuser• 1 year ago

its like every problem slice Ive been solving over the decades as a sysadmin is a huge market opportunity

majestik2• 1 year ago

This deal isn't about security, it's about data.

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.

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.

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.

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]

Sources:

0: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com

1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

2: https://www.wiz.io/customers

breppp5• 1 year ago

So many sources yet no source of the actually outrageous claim that Google will use this to illegally siphon customer data

maybe this deal is about a company with a lot of revenue in an area google is heavily investing in: cloud security?

diggan4• 1 year ago

actually outrageous claim that Google will use this to illegally siphon customer data

Hypothetical question as much as anything: If Google purchases a company and the data the company stores about their customers, is it illegal for them to use this data for whatever they want?

Lets say it would give them an understanding of what features from AWS people tend to use the most, and they use that to improve Google Cloud, would that be illegal?

billjings• 1 year ago

Facebook did exactly this with a VPN acquisition. They didn't break into customer data; they just mined it for usage patterns.

So as a pure speculation on Goog's motives, it doesn't sound farfetched enough to call ridiculous. Competitive data is valuable, particularly if you want to strangle the youth in their cradles (or acquire them).

kossTKR• 1 year ago

Thousands of lawsuits coming up? How are any of the mentioned companies okay with their highly confidential data being scanned by AI?

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

Project Zero and Wiz and have very little in common. It's wrong to bring these two up together as if they are comparable. Project Zero focuses on discovering and analysis of new (including zero-day) vulnerabilities. I do not believe Wiz uncovers new vulnerabilities. The skillset of someone working on Project Zero looks very different from someone working on Wiz.

The field of security is huge. It's unhelpful to lump unrelated things together.

sofixa2• 1 year ago

I do not believe Wiz uncovers new vulnerabilities

Oh they do. https://www.wiz.io/blog/tag/research

A few fun ones are the multiple cross-tenant security exploits they found in Azure (which is why, among the tons of other reasons, Azure is just the worst possible choice for a cloud vendor from the big 3 - their security is a joke, and none of the vulnerabilities below should have passed even a cursory security review, but they did, which means the whole org doesn't take security seriously. Add in the fact that it's slow as hell, and has the UX worthy of an Enterprise vendor, the only reason to choose it is because you're getting a good deal on the golf course for it):

https://www.wiz.io/blog/azure-active-directory-bing-misconfi...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/omigod-critical-vulnerabilities-in-o...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/secret-agent-exposes-azure-customers...

https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a...

nolist_policy2• 1 year ago

Google has the best security. But it is hard to market real security (as oposed to snake-oil), so maybe this acquisition will help.

johnisgood• 1 year ago

Google has the best security.

Care to elaborate?

marcus0x6212• 1 year ago

Google isn’t buying Wiz for “security expertise”, they’re buying Wiz for a security product, in a growth area, that customers absolutely love. You’ve provided no evidence for the conspiracy theory that google is buying Wiz to siphon up a bunch of data, and if you’re going to link to Wiz, maybe link to their public list of security certifications, many of which prohibit the type of data harvesting you are suggesting.

https://trust.wiz.io/

tasuki2• 1 year ago

"Trust" screams insecurity. Security is in the direction of trustless rather than requiring trust. Do you trust companies which say front and center "you can trust us"?

Wiz is a "security product"? Security isn't something you can buy and bolt on to your systems as an afterthought. It doesn't work like that!

megous3• 1 year ago

I trust open source code I can see and compile and control. :)

How is "trusting wiz" (trusting some icons on website controlled by wiz leading to publicly inaccessible reports, half of which are done by a single company somewhere in Florida) related to what Google might do with it after aquisition?

reliabilityguy• 1 year ago

They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.

Yes, because exploit discovery is exactly what enterprise security is.

laweijfmvo• 1 year ago

I find it hard to believe (or maybe I don’t want to believe) that this could ever happen? Even if Wiz has T&C’s that allow full access to clients’ data, and even if the T&C allow some sort of “use” of that data that includes training an LLM, surely you can’t release an AI trained on private information to the public? You can’t have Gemini spitting out internal/private/confidential information?

Am I just naive?

bilater• 1 year ago

na you're right this would be a dumb move with a huge blow back

Izikiel43• 1 year ago

I'm guessing you would be the same guy who wouldn't torrent millions of books and copyrighted works to train your LLM. Zuck can afford not to care about that pesky detail

You are not naive, you are not considering that at certain scales, your concerns are the cost of doing business.

danielmarkbruce2• 1 year ago

This is an incredibly stupid take on the deal.

petargyurov• 1 year ago

This is an incredibly useless comment [0]

At least say why you think so and contribute to the conversation a bit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

panarky• 1 year ago

The top three topics of batshit conspiracy theory supported by precisely zero actual evidence:

1) Hidden cabals colluding in secret to control world events.

2) Extraterrestrial beings live among us secretly controlling world events.

3) Google illegally steals private data to secretly control world events.

thefourthchime• 1 year ago

This theory of yours is a conspiracy. Google would never start training off of confidential corporate information without authorization. The legal team would never allow it. And if they ever got caught, it would be a complete disaster for them.

czk2• 1 year ago

Using private data to train a public LLM seems like a huge liability that Google's legal team would never approve. I could see them using the data for all sorts of kinds of analytics though. I heard Google deals in those a lot.

qwertox• 1 year ago

Project Zero is about finding security issues, not about developing products to increase security.

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

That doesn't sound very secure at all

eranation3• 1 year ago

I believe you are right in the direction, but wrong on the details. Yes they will now have tons of otherwise inaccessible data about how Wiz customer use GCP’s competitors (AWS/Azure), eg what workloads, how much they pay, how many EC2 / EKS / ECS / RDS / S3 / SageMaker are actually used and how much they pay. This is by itself highly valuable financial information, that any company would love to have about their direct competition.

I highly doubt Google or Wiz have a legal avenue that allows them to use customer data beyond fulfilling their product needs. Products like Wiz (voluntarily) go through security audits and certifications, from SOC2 type 2 to FedRamp. Also enterprise customers actually do read T&C (their legal team does at least) and having terms and conditions that allow you to train models on customer data without their consent is not going to fly under the radar for long.

seydor• 1 year ago

wiz probbaly found some big vulnerability in google, and they are now forced to buy them.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

Assaf Rappaport and his co-founders now stand to make more than $3 billion each from the sale...

https://archive.ph/SoeUd

Keyframe2• 1 year ago

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.

tzury2• 1 year ago

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.

It helped them “get to the point” quicker and “cleaner”.

kats4• 1 year ago

Google is making a huge mistake. They are clearly getting scammed, the price is up to $32B from $23B less than a year ago.

There is no pressure or need to buy Wiz.

dinobones• 1 year ago

This makes no sense.

Assume 1,000 customers each generating $2m in ARR with contracts. That’s $2 billion. Assume generous 6x ARR valuation, that’s $12 billion.

Where is this $20 billion premium coming from? How could the board approve this? How is this fair to shareholders?

Heck, as a minor shareholder in GOOG, I don’t find this financially responsible at all.

I can’t help but think sometimes these tech acquisitions have some hint of nepotism/deeper underlying motivations behind them than meets the eye.

eranation3• 1 year ago

I have no basis for this thought other than speculation, but I imagine GCP having previously unaccessible data about a lot of AWS and Azure workloads of potential GCP customers, gotta be worth at least something... if a customer is generating 2m ARR for Wiz, how much of ARR they generate to AWS/Azure if they are not a GCP customer? Again, this is just speculation and I have no idea if it has any basis in reality, but this was my first thought back when they made the first offer.

Taek• 1 year ago

How is 6x generous? Alphabet's P/E is 23. That means $2 billion rev implies $46b valuation (assuming high margins)

These deals always have more than meets the eye. Google wouldn't acquire revenue at a fair market price just for revenue's sake - there's some reason they expect to get value beyond the revenue.

That doesn't mean its nepotism. It could be that they think they can triple revenue per customer with some synergy. Or any number of a large set of other possibilities.

If you want to understand this type of transaction better, you can read a book on M&A

tgma2• 1 year ago

P/E is the earnings multiple, not revenue. Your assuming high margins is doing a lot of legwork here. Often untrue for growing startups.

bflesch• 1 year ago

They advertise "Unified visibility and security across code, CI/CD, and cloud environments" - maybe it's google's way to siphon off proprietary code from private Azure and AWS environments in order to train their AI. Google does not own Github, they must be severely lacking in private training data.

freeqaz• 1 year ago

Imagine you are a company, like Wiz, that is still growing fast.

Sure, your valuation could be based on revenue today. But why would you sell if you're "worth" $12bn right now, but you'll be "worth" 32bn in a few years? Why give up the control?

The only way for a company like Google to buy Wiz is to add a premium. Otherwise the company will just say "no".

This literally happened to Figma as well. And there is a history of this with companies like Instagram/WhatsApp.

In retrospect, was it stupid for Facebook to acquire Instagram/WhatsApp for large premiums?

xvector• 1 year ago

The top shareholders might want to cash out and move on to their next venture, thus netting more money

epolanski9• 1 year ago

Slightly OT but it kinda triggers me this abuse of company's worth and value words are consistently used instead of priced.

xpe• 1 year ago

Did you have your conclusion in mind before running your back of the envelope calculation? Many people do this much of the time. That often results in motivated reasoning.

One way to reduce that tendency is to use multiple POVs of analysis. You could phrase it as a question instead: what assumptions would you need to change for the valuation to make sense?

Other questions: What factors are you not including? / What would it take for nepotism to survive scrutiny and how much nepotism would be tolerated?

My guess here is there are long-term strategic factors that the decision makers weighed heavily. I’d be very interested in understanding their world view, since they have much better internal visibility of both companies.

debarshri5• 1 year ago

It is one of the fastest growing companies in the cybersecurity space. 6x ARR is quite low for that. 15x is a great deal for Google.

I think Wiz accepted 15x because it is all-cash.

The rate at which they are still growing, a series C/D company would dream of.

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-th...

asdfman123• 1 year ago

Google's whole business for the last 20 years has been buying, growing, and profiting handsomely from acquisitions.

csomar3• 1 year ago

Except their ARR is $500m and not $2bn. So that's x60?

rockmeamedee• 1 year ago

Fastest growing but because they participated in a pay-for-play kickback scheme [1][2]?

So that number isn't really signal. Now that they're not paying CISOs to adopt the product they're not going to be growing as fast.

[1] https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/cyberstarts-program-s... [2] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc

deepsun2• 1 year ago

Same fears we're very loud when Google bought YouTube. GOOG fell 15% because of that IIRC.

epolanski9• 1 year ago

It was a huge bet, it paid off for many reasons, not least luck.

I remember 2005/2006 there were many websites competing for the video-website role, YouTube's luck was that...they were very permissive on uploads while competitors like Vimeo e.g. employed a reasonable amount of content moderators.

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

Assume 1,000 customers each generating $2m in ARR with contracts. That’s $2 billion. Assume generous 6x ARR valuation, that’s $12 billion.

That's the thing , were any numbers released or are we all just gonna speculate here ? What is their growth rate, profit margin etc etc ? How do they fit in Google's business, can current Wiz clients be upsold on GCP more easily now? Can other clients be brought more easily to GCP now that Google has a good (I hope) cyber security solution to go with its cloud? Clearly there is some strategy going on here that is more than just the ARR of Wiz.

As a minor shareholder in GOOG as well I have no freaking idea about any of this, I sort of trust that they probably took a calculate risk and know what they're doing (and even if this is a mistake by 20B, that's not much for a company the size of Google).

jll292• 1 year ago

We all know a lot of people frowned when YouTube was acquired.

Now we know that was an excellent deal for Google (now Alphabet), despite being a long bet.

Good to have top security talent and good cloud security tooling if you're in a cloud play.

csomar3• 1 year ago

According to a few articles (and Reuters) it is $500m/year

wildekek• 1 year ago

There are always ulterior motives and I've seen personal and strategic being the most frequent ones.

encoderer3• 1 year ago

6x arr is not a generous multiple for this size of business.

twakefield2• 1 year ago

There is a correlation analysis in Jamin Ball's "Clouded Judgement" substack [1] which shows the correlation between next twelve month ("NTM") Revenue Multiples and Revenue Annual Growth Rates for public market tech / SaaS stocks.

The current Slope-Intercept is (NTM Revenue Multiple) = 36.677*(NTM Rev Growth Rate) + 2.0013. If Wiz is doubling revenue (100% Growth Rate) and they are at about $500M of revenue today [2], then the multiple according to that calculation is ~38.7 X Next Twelve Month Revenue ($1B) or $38.7B.

So, the price is in line with the market...or you could argue even a discount to it.

[1] https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-31... [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/google-stock-price-wiz-deal...

epolanski9• 1 year ago

How could the board approve this?

Disagreements on board levels are less and less frequent in the corporate world.

On top of that, many huge voters are simply ETFs, and their representatives virtually always side with management (state street, vanguard, etc have documents that explain their voting, but they are far from any kind of activist or naysayer.

i_play_stax• 1 year ago

Tin foil hat time, Google regularly complies with LEO. It's often joked they are an unofficial intelligence agency; peers being CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. Wiz is a foreign-owned company with a detailed vulnerability map of more than 50% of the Fortune 100. It can be argued this is a matter of national security, and not simply business.

DeathArrow2• 1 year ago

Assume 1,000 customers each generating $2m in ARR with contracts. That’s $2 billion

Maybe they just need the tech. With Google behind, they can have 10,000 customers.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t• 1 year ago

Cyber warfare and cyber defense cannot be measured in money easily.

Take a look at other Unit 8200 startups, or even Palantir. Palantir is much much much more worth than what they are on paper, especially with their Lavender AI involvements.

Cyber strategies have become so critical that it's a race between nations right now. The leading ones being Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and the US (while the US is heavily losing control, just in terms of malware and campaigns). Stuxnet forced the hands of the other nations, and they invested fully in Cyber eversince.

jisnsm• 1 year ago

Really it makes no sense that Google would want to siphon money off to Israel?

perlgeek• 1 year ago

I don't think Google is buying Wiz because they hope that revenue from Wiz will make it worth their money.

They surely expect some kind of strategic advantage from that, probably something to do with security of their own infrastructure, or maybe competitive advantage for gaining government or gov-adjacent contracts, or maybe they were afraid that Microsoft or Amazon could buy it and hurt their existing business.

Ancalagon• 1 year ago

This make's Twitter's acquisition look like an absolute steal by comparison.

cft• 1 year ago

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.

hard_times• 1 year ago

This is one super weird acquisition

bitlad• 1 year ago

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.

[1] https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/cyberstarts- program-sparks-debate-over-ethical-boundaries-p-3763

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...

Zaheer• 1 year ago

Great article on the genesis of Wiz:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250312193110/https://www.forbe...

siliconc0w2• 1 year ago

A good test for the new Trump DOJ to see how much TRUMP coin and $5 million dinners at Mar-a-Lago will be needed to get this through.

Wheaties466• 1 year ago

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.

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.

tinyhouse• 1 year ago

The founder's previous exit in the same space was sold to Microsoft for $350. What a steal.

The most amazing thing is that Wiz is a fairly young company. Founded in early 2000.

One thing for sure. If this guy ever starts another company, I'm sending my resume :)

smlacy• 1 year ago

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.

kubb• 1 year ago

Almost... unbelievable.

tombert2• 1 year ago

I have no idea how these corporate acquisitions are valued.

Craftsman Tools was sold to Black and Decker for $500 Million. This was and is a respected tool brand with an international presence making physical and tangible products and it is apparently worth 1/64th of Wiz.

I'm not even saying Wiz is overvalued, I don't know, I'm just not sure how they come up with these numbers.

therealdrag0• 1 year ago

I think the main calculus is around estimating future profits. Do they make a profit? Is it a crowded space? Is the market space growing? What assets do they have? People, land, factories, or intellectual IP? Etc etc.

I don’t know the details of either deal but it’s easy to imagine a case where Craftsman tools is just a brand in a crowded market with no special sauce. For example Sears never even made the tools, they outsourced it. Also it sold for 900m, 500m was the initial payment.

jonjojojon• 1 year ago

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?

lrae• 1 year ago

The biggest competitor is Orca (pretty much the same product) and they even accuse Wiz of patent infringement. Trial starts in December. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ryjc8dgnr

Being owned by Google probably would help in those regards too now.

odysseus2• 1 year ago

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

odysseus2• 1 year ago

Nevermind, this looks like a different Wiz.

jimnotgym• 1 year ago

Can someone tell me what Wiz actually does, I can't make head nor tail of it from their website. Cloud security is pretty meaningless as a phrase

9cb14c1ec0• 1 year ago

I dunno which VCs invested in them, but whoever did is headed for a very, very big payday.

drukenemo• 1 year ago

RIP Wiz. Everything that Google puts their hands on, dies within years.

subarctic• 1 year ago

I take it this isn't Wiz the smart bulb company but some other Wiz?

gregmac• 1 year ago

Yeah, I was afraid for a second there. I have a few Wiz bulbs and was hoping that ecosystem wouldn't suddenly die

dtquad• 1 year ago

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.

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.

darylteo• 1 year ago

I had this confused with Wix

topherPedersen• 1 year ago

They should have used that money to buy Perplexity.

antirez• 1 year ago

From every angle I try to look at this, it does not make 32B sense.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

I have a "wiz" app on my phone that controls my lights. When I read the headline I initially thought it was about this.

lawrenceyan• 1 year ago

Congrats on the acquisition!

bloodyplonker22• 1 year ago

Anyone here heard of Lacework? Nope. Thought so. This could have been Lacework had Mike Speiser not let his hubris catch up with himself.

throwaway399933• 1 year ago

I immediately went Ctrl + F "Lacework". Another Lacer! Haha, oh well... maybe at the next startup.

Animats• 1 year ago

That's a lot of money for 2000 employees. $16 million per employee. How many employees get something out of this?

guappa8• 1 year ago

A pizza party

gatkinso• 1 year ago

Insider baseball IMO.

rexreed2• 1 year ago

100% -- many of these acquisitions don't start through the front door.

nujabe3• 1 year ago

"Israel literally owned Congress" - Donald Trump [1]

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.

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]

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.

It would be naive to think the leadership at Alphabet are unaware of that good things happen when you be good to Zionists.

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]

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-israel-literally-owned-c...

[2] https://time.com/7268749/education-department-staff-cuts-imp...

[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/whatsapp-founder-jan-koum-dona...

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

"Israel literally owned Congress" - Donald Trump [1]

Let me guess, when Trump says some crazy exaggeration you will immediately believe him if it sheds a bad light on Israel - but only then. Otherwise you wouldn't believe him because he's a pathological liar right?

The silly thing is he said it was a decade ago and today its the exact opposite, so that doesn't agree with what you said at all.

nujabe3• 1 year ago

You might believe this guy.

https://x.com/letsgobrando45/status/1847255056988373079?s=46

https://x.com/megatron_ron/status/1788092840783835473?s=46

yalogin• 1 year ago

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?

Among the wiz customers if they use GCP already then surely they will be willing to try the functionality of google builds it.

If the customer doesn’t use GCP, chances are they wont move to GCP and probably move away from wiz too after the acquisition.

I don’t get why they bought them instead of copying them

nujabe3• 1 year ago

If AIPAC were a publicly traded company, its stock would be through the roof today.

twinofpoolg• 1 year ago

Open money laundering at its finest. Google, a Jewish company, transfers 45x money times ARR to Israel Jews.

Google could have built this in-house.

While millions and billions struggle this is how you do it at high level.

SoonDar goes brrrrrrr.

dingody• 1 year ago

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.

ponty_rick2• 1 year ago

I can see how Microsoft and AWS would now favor Wiz competitors now (Orca, Palo, Crowdstrike etc)

lynn_xx• 1 year ago

Wiz is an amazing startup. I really like their marketing, it's so funny and it shines in terms of growth!

magicfractal• 1 year ago

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.

kbbgl87• 1 year ago

Say more.

llmthrow103• 1 year ago

American states wish they had as much influence on US politics as Israel.

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

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?

asdf6969• 1 year ago

Mossad plot

DidYaWipe• 1 year ago

Did I miss it, or did this entire article neglect to say WTF "Wiz" does?

kome• 1 year ago

This transaction with an ICC sanctioned country is suspicious to say the least... it's like asking to do business with a Russian company.

tlogan• 1 year ago

GCP needs Wiz, but whether Wiz can actually save GCP is another question—probably not.

m00dy• 1 year ago

lol, there's somethin wrong here.

maxlin• 1 year ago

Well, crap. Inb4 their cheap and easily hackable bulbs I have integrated to my self-written automation things go to shit.

People who haven't forgotten what happened with Revolv remember.

pbiggar2• 1 year ago

This is the largest transfer of Israeli intelligence operatives into a US company in history. Y'all are in for a real bad time.

DSingularity• 1 year ago

Yeah right.

https://x.com/paulbiggar/status/1902329587050148068?s=46

EternalFury• 1 year ago

Such a weird move. They must have too much cash because they are not buying GPUs from Jensen.

yakkomajuri3• 1 year ago

Extracting this from my comment on a subthread to add color to the discussion here.

They announced in a blog post that they went from $1m ARR to $100m ARR in 18 months (Feb 2021 -> July 2022). [1]

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.

One would thus speculate they are likely a few hundred million above the half-a-billion figure today.

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.

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-th...

twakefield2• 1 year ago

particularly given it's all-cash, which Google doesn't even have

GOOG's latest balance sheet showed $96B in cash.

yakkomajuri3• 1 year ago

Sorry. I pulled my figure from the article in the post which claims "Google had $23.47 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of Dec. 31, implying it might have to seek financing for the deal."

elAhmo3• 1 year ago

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.

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.

Most people using Waze have no idea that it is owned by Google.

Aeolun3• 1 year ago

$32B for an entity with 500M in ARR? What the blazes are they paying for?

mocules• 1 year ago

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.

Google to buy Wiz for $32B

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