Google Revives speaks to acquire wiz to greater assessment

The Alphabet of the Google parent company returns to the advanced conversations to acquire the cybersecurity startup in the Wiz cloud, said a person familiar with the agreement with Techcrunch. The two companies were close to obtaining an agreement with an assessment of $ 23 billion last summer, but the transaction did not materialize.

This time, the price that is being discussed is higher, the person said. A price of around $ 30 billion was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Thomas Kurian, head of the Google cloud division, is again leading the effort.

Google Cloud sees Wiz's cloud security products as a good adjustment for its customer base, and Wiz's annual recurring income (RR) are also attractive. This was $ 500 million last July with plans to reach $ 1 billion in REN in 2025, Techcrunch reported at that time.

Even so, $ 30 billion would probably be a premium price. Wiz closed its last external financing round of $ 1 billion to an assessment of $ 12 billion last May. According to reports, its valuation has increased to $ 16 billion in an employee tender offer at the end of last year.

Although Wiz said he had no plans to make public in 2025, he hired Fazal Merchant, a former Dreamworks and Tanium executive as financial director. Sometimes, hiring a CFO is a sign of preparing books for a public offer.

One of the reasons why the conversations failed previously was the inability of the two companies to agree if Wiz would remain as a separate division or would be integrated into Google Cloud, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The high regulatory scrutiny of large transactions during the Biden administration also contributed to the breakdown of the agreement last summer, said the family person.

Other investors have told TechCrunch that they are seeing an increase in M&A activity. In most cases, the return to the negotiation table is correlated with the hope that the president of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, is less restrictive in large transactions than former President Lina Khan, said a person familiar with a handful of such negotiations.

The WIZ -based Wiz and Israel was founded in 2020 by four former Israeli military officers who previously co -founded a cloud cyber security company called Adallom that Microsoft then acquired for $ 320 million.

Wiz sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz, Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, Insight Partners and Sequoia.

A Wiz spokesman declined to comment on the conversations of agreement.