This is the largest acquisition in Alphabet’s history.
The purchase of Wiz is a smart offensive move on Google’s part.
This acquisition is part of a larger trend of cybersecurity consolidation occurring. Tech firms and PE firms are actively acquiring cyber firms because security is now a recognized component of every corporate Board conversation and an integral part of every business. Good security is just good business in 2025.
You may be asking yourself what factors determined such a hefty price and its likely that there were a combination that included revenue growth, Wiz’s market position, GTM strategy, executive team savvy, the forward thinking product tech, and an overall strategic security fit with Google Cloud.
Before we do that though, let’s take a peek at the Cloud Security market.
The global cloud security market was valued at around USD 37.87 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 156.25 billion by 2032. That’s about a 17% annual growth rate. There is clearly money to be made in the space.
One Stop rocket ship for Cloud Security in the Making
But back to Wiz. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that made Alphabet pay attention to this security start up.
Wiz aims to provide a one-stop shop for cloud security, offering tools for cloud detection and response, container security, vulnerability management, and more.
Revenue Growth
Wiz has more than $500 million in annual recurring revenue as of August, 2024. That path to revenue was a rocket ship.
Founded in 2020, Wiz is considered one of the fastest growing startups of all time. According to Wiz blogs, revenue hit $100M ARR in just 18 months. By the end of 2023, revenue had reached $350M ARR. Wiz is poised to achieve $1B in ARR this year. For a little color, out of more than 10,000 companies in the cybersecurity industry, only around 10 have achieved the $1 billion revenue mark (a mere 0.00001). Keep in mind that the timeline on this race to the $1 billion revenue mark is only 5 years.
The Startup Savvy Team
The Wiz CEO, Assaf Rappaport, and several on his executive team knew just how to build a successful security startup. This team was behind Adallom — the cloud security startup that Microsoft bought for $320 million in 2015 and later rebranded as Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
GTM Strategy
Wiz targeted Fortune 500 companies from the start, drawing on their Microsoft experience to meet enterprise-scale demands. As a result, Wiz serves 45% of the Fortune 100.
Wiz is a cloud security platform that falls under the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) categories, offering a comprehensive approach to securing cloud environments, including AI security.
Secret Tech Sauce
Traditional security is often based on scans that are done in isolation at the asset or configuration level. A bigger picture context of how assets interact with one another and subsequent higher level risks has always been a challenge. Wiz offers a graph based architecture that allows for a more comprehensive understanding of asset interaction. This is visibility and this is key. And this is not just for one cloud, it’s a multi cloud approach to visibility that allows the security team to fully map all their entire cloud footprint. In fact, Wiz pioneered using a graph database to solve the cloud visibility problem. A graph-based model is fundamentally a representation of relationships between two cloud entities.
Security teams as well as development teams are Wiz fans because the graph technology allows them to visualize complex relationships, prioritize risk based on context, trace potential attack paths quickly, provide contextual remediation workflows, and automate dependency tracking and impact analysis.
Cloud environments are inherently complex. In large cloud footprints, there are often thousands of resources constantly being created, modified, and destroyed. Wiz’s graph-based dynamically connects the dots of virtual machines, containers, databases, APIs, and networks—into a cohesive structure.
Many of Wiz’s initial customers were enterprises managing thousands of different cloud assets. This seasoned team which had already achieved a security startup exit with Microsoft knew how to architect their platform for larger clients.
Wiz helped to fine tune agentless security across multiple clouds.
So a big part of Wiz’s secret sauce to early success was visibility and context at scale.
Wiz also realized early that more than 50% of its users sit outside of the security function, often in development and on cloud teams. Wiz expanded on its initial market success by extending its capabilities both left and right of the cloud infrastructure by addressing cloud risks in application code and the recognition of application runtime threats.
Wiz allows security teams to assign specific remediation tasks directly to relevant developers or DevOps teams with full context into why each action is necessary.
Wiz continued its developer-focused strategy by acquiring Raftt in late 2023 with the focus of connecting local developer environments into cloud kubernetes environments. This allowed Wiz to build a meaningful cloud native solution instead of a bolt on product.
Wiz has expanded its product set into code to cloud mapping, allow Wiz tools to trace risks in the cloud automatically back to the code and teams that introduced them, providing in-code remediation guidance to developers, container image integrity and in-cloud agentless SBOM scanning.
Since 2022, Wiz has launched products related to Cloud Detection and Response
The acquisition of Gem Security in 2024 helped accelerate the delivery of a product designed for SOC and Incident Response teams. Wiz Defend empowers SecOps teams to stop threats before they become breaches by automating investigations and visualizing threats, enabling rapid, informed responses to sophisticated cloud-native attacks.
It’s important to note that Wiz has successfully developed these capabilities into a single platform. Unlike many competitors, Wiz has largely built its platform capabilities in-house rather than relying on multiple acquisitions. This strategy has allowed Wiz to maintain a unified codebase and a coherent user experience.
What’s next for Wiz?
AI security is on the menu. Wiz is the first CNAPP to offer native AI security capabilities, including AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM). They released this tech in late 2023. This tool gives organizations unconditional visibility, allowing the security team to immediately detect new AI services introduced into the environment such as AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, and Azure Cognitive Research and flag the different technologies as approved, unwanted, and unreviewed.
Wiz also has opportunities to expand into cloud security adjacencies such as API security, DAST and Rem-Ops. The audience here is DevOps, SecOps and development teams. Wiz can become a comprehensive security platform in the enterprise space.
Wiz’s products will continue to be available across other major cloud services. Alphabet expects the deal to close in 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
Why Add Wiz Now?
Wiz represents opportunity in a number of ways. In short, the platform is the story and maybe the lucky charm for Google.
Google’s cloud unit generated $43 billion in 2024. While it is doing a great job outpacing growth in the company’s search business, revenues lag behind its two hyperscaler competitors MSFT and AWS with respective revenue of $105.4 billion and $107.6 billion in 2024.
Microsoft’s security revenue has doubled in two years, reaching $20 billion annually.
Microsoft is taking market share across all major categories in the cybersecurity space.
Amazon’s strategy has been to embed security internally into its tools and relying primarily on partnerships with cybersecurity vendors
Google has been increasing its focus on security in the last several years first developing SIEM capabilities in-house with Chronicle, then supplementing that with a $500 million purchase of SOAR provider Siemplify in early 2022 and expanding into incident response and threat intelligence with the $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant in late 2022.
The Wiz purchase enables Google to match Microsoft and bundle cloud computing and cloud security capabilities together—no third party integrations needed.
It also gives Google access to the 45% of the F100 which Wiz counts as clients. Its highly likely that while these firms might have some Google cloud footprint, chances are strong that they are predominately AWS or Azure shops.
Here’s wishing the luck of the Irish to my friends at Google on a speedy close to the Wiz purchase!