Google Might Spend $23 Billion to Acquire a Cybersecurity Startup

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is in “advanced talks” to acquire Wiz, a cybersecurity firm, for $23 billion.

Wiz is not a legacy company in this space: The startup is only four years old, but has been growing quickly ever since. In May, the company was worth $12 billion. Google reportedly wants to buy it for nearly double that valuation.

If the deal goes through, it would make this acquisition the largest ever for Google. While the company has plenty of large acquisitions under its belt, it bought another cybersecurity company, Mandiant, two years ago for $5.4 billion. A Wiz acquisition would be multitudes larger.

Wiz is a cloud security company. Founded in 2020, the startup advertises itself as a solution for organizations to create “secure cloud environments that accelerate their business.” Wiz offers a “normalizing layer” between a customer’s cloud environments, so that organization can locate issues and eliminate them. According to Wiz’s stats, 40% of Fortune 100 companies are customers, totaling five million cloud workloads.

The New York Times reports that it’s Thomas Kurian, head of Google Cloud, that is behind this acquisition push. Perhaps by acquiring Wiz, Google will establish itself as a true secure cloud platform. However, even if the deal goes through, there could be antitrust concerns to deal with.

This will be a fascinating deal to watch from here on out.