Wiz CEO: Google Acquisition Is ‘Effectively Strapping A Rocket To Our Backs’

The proposed $32 billion deal to combine Wiz with Google Cloud is poised to ‘accelerate our rate of innovation’ than the company could on its own, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in a post.

Google’s proposed $32 billion deal to acquire Wiz is poised to take an already rapidly growing cloud and AI security platform and get things moving even faster, Wiz Co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in a post Tuesday.

The all-cash deal — which is subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions — is aimed at bolstering Google Cloud’s cybersecurity portfolio with capabilities from Wiz’s platform.

The announcement Tuesday came after Wiz had previously walked away from a reported $23 billion acquisition offer from Google last summer.

In his blog post, Rappaport (pictured) did not specify what else may be different now besides the price tag, though he suggested that the dramatic pace of change in the cybersecurity world was a factor.

“Wiz has achieved so much in a relatively short period, but cybersecurity moves at warp speed and so must we. The time is now,” he wrote.

“We expect this change to enable us to execute and innovate even faster,” Rappaport wrote in the post Tuesday. “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs: it will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a standalone company.”

Right out of the gate, Wiz had stood out from the thousands of other cybersecurity startups operating in the market. The cloud and AI security vendor has been growing at a “blinding pace” practically since the get-go after its founding in 2020, Wiz President and CFO Fazal Merchant said in a recent interview with CRN.

The Wiz approach has been to offer capabilities that rapidly and dramatically improve cloud visibility, enabling partners and customers to fix misconfigurations and other security gaps in the cloud.

But while the company started out focused on cloud, Wiz has been increasingly focused on bringing its same approach to the AI security space. For instance, Wiz became one of the first major vendors to offer AI-SPM (AI security posture management) upon launching the offering in November 2023, a move that was later followed by a number of other competitors.

Wiz already possessed the highest valuation of any venture-backed cybersecurity vendor at $12 billion, and its annual recurring revenue reached $500 million last year with an expectation to cross $1 billion this year.

Crucially, Wiz has also been doubling down on its work with solution providers, and Rappaport told CRN in an interview last year that partners will undoubtedly be pivotal to the company’s next phases of growth.

“In cybersecurity partners are super, super important in the success of a company. So we’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into. I think there is so much more we can do,” he said at the time.

The areas where partners can work with Wiz to serve customers cover the spectrum from securing code repositories to protecting applications during runtime, Rappaport said during the previous interview.

“The opportunity for the partners in working with Wiz is being at the table as stakeholders around every new initiative that’s happening,” he said at the time. “Cloud is the next infrastructure for the organization, and this is where you want to be.”

Crucially, Rappaport said in the post Tuesday that partners “remain integral to our strategy of making Wiz open to organizations of all types and sizes.”

Organizations “now have an even more compelling reason to embrace our cloud security platform; the timing has never been better to partner with Wiz,” he wrote.

The proposed acquisition by Google also follows the “same guiding principle” that led the company to launch five years ago, according to Rappaport.

“Wiz and Google Cloud are both fueled by the belief that cloud security needs to be easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and democratized, so more organizations can adopt and use cloud and AI securely,” he said.

Ultimately, “all of us at Wiz are committed to continued innovation, to accelerate our pace,” Rappaport said, with the singular goal of providing the “best security platform the world has ever seen.”