Google’s $23 Billion Wiz Acquisition Deal Has Dissolved: Report

The discussions have fallen apart as Wiz seeks to remain independent, Wiz’s CEO reportedly told employees Monday.

Google’s bid to acquire Wiz has disintegrated as the cloud security vendor seeks to remain independent, Wiz’s CEO reportedly told employees Monday.

Last week, multiple media reports pointed to advanced talks around Google parent Alphabet acquiring Wiz for $23 billion, which would have been the company’s largest acquisition to date.

Now, however, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the talks to acquire Wiz have dissolved. Wiz Co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport told employees in an email Monday that the fast-growing company has “chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz,” according to the internal email seen by the Journal.

CRN has reached out to Google and Wiz for comment.

Founded in 2020, Wiz has seen surging growth essentially from the get-go with its offering that accelerates the delivery of visibility and security for cloud environments.

More recently, Wiz has also doubled down on providing native AI security capabilities with its AI-SPM (AI security posture management) offering.

Wiz reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by mid-2022 and, earlier this year, said its ARR had surpassed $350 million.

The reported acquisition price tag would have been nearly twice the $12 billion valuation that Wiz had achieved in May, in connection with raising $1 billion in new funding.

In February, Rappaport told CRN that the company was eyeing an initial public offering and that it may not take as long to achieve as some might think.

“We want to be a public company. So that's our overall goal. I would say when we’ve reached probably $1 billion in ARR, that would be when we should be thinking more seriously about IPO,” he said in the February interview.

But with a number of recent moves including several major executive hires, “I think that's around the corner,” Rappaport said at the time.

Antitrust actions by the U.S. government and European authorities have increased against tech giants Google, AWS and Microsoft in recent years, a factor that had also hung over the potential Google-Wiz deal.