Wiz: The Startup Google Just Paid $32B For

Google has acquired cloud security startup Wiz for about $32 billion, which makes it the largest acquisition in the company’s history (surpassing Motorola Mobility at $12.5B in 2012). The deal closes a chapter that started only a few years ago when Wiz appeared out of nowhere and suddenly every cloud security team was talking about it.

How It Started

Wiz launched in 2020. Companies had moved huge chunks of their infrastructure into the cloud, but actually seeing what was happening inside those environments was difficult. Security teams were juggling dashboards from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while trying to track thousands of services, permissions, and containers.

So Wiz built a platform that scans those environments and maps the risks in one place. No more forcing teams to chase alerts across different systems because it shows how vulnerabilities connect. An exposed database might link to an over-permissioned service account which links to a sensitive workload. Suddenly the security team can see the whole chain instead of three disconnected warnings.

Big tech ate it up. Wiz's customers: Salesforce, Slack, BMW, Morgan Stanley and more. Revenue grew fast. Within a few years the company crossed hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue and became one of the fastest growing cybersecurity startups in the cloud era.

The founders were also not exactly beginners. Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica (cool name), Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik had built another security company Adallom. Microsoft acquired that in 2015 and turned it into a core piece of Microsoft’s cloud security stack. After leaving Microsoft, the same group came back with Wiz.

How It's Going

Google had already tried to buy the company before. The convo started in 2024 but stalled when Wiz decided to stay independent a bit longer. Now the deal has finally closed, and Wiz will move into Google Cloud’s security division.

Wiz went from launch to a $32 billion exit in about four years. That's fast, even by Silicon Valley standards. It became one of the tools security teams actually like using, which is not something you hear often about security software.

Now the product moves inside one of the largest cloud companies in the world. We'll see how independent it stays. DevSec teams tend to scream *sus* when their favorite tools suddenly belong to a cloud provider.

Either way, a small cybersecurity startup just became one of the most expensive acquisitions in tech history. Not bad for something that started as a better way to look at cloud permissions.