Wiz has walked away from a deal with Google that would have valued the company at $23 billion. If the company agreed to the deal, this would have been the largest-ever acquisition by Google.
Saying no to such a humbling offer is tough.
Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport
According to sources, the tech company weighed antitrust and investor concerns as reasons for rejecting the promising deal.
Wiz is set to focus now on its next milestones: an initial public offering and $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Founded in 2020, Wiz provides cloud security services such as prevention, active detection, and response, which appeal to large firms. Under Rappaport, the company has increased, hitting $100 million in annual recurring revenue after 18 months, and reached $350 million last year.
However, the Google deal would have doubled the startup’s valuation of $12 billion, accounting for its recent round of funding. This deal would have helped Google compete with Microsoft, which also sells security software.
After the Wiz launch in 2020 came the pandemic, which made large companies shift to adopt cloud-based software and infrastructures to enable their workers to work remotely. This greatly benefited the tech startup as it could flag security issues for applications and data on the Google, Oracle, Google, and Microsoft public cloud.
By 2021, Wiz announced a $100 million funding round.
I think what was unique with Wiz in the early days was the amount of money raised from the get-go.
Sid Trivedi, an investor at Foundation Capital
