Google said to finalize purchase of Israel’s Wiz for record-breaking $32 billion

Google’s parent company, Alphabet agrees to buy Israeli-founded cybersecurity unicorn Wiz for a staggering record $32 billion, the Financial Times reports.

It marks the largest deal in Israeli tech after US giant Intel Corp bought Mobileye, a Jerusalem-based developer of advanced vision and driver assistance systems, for $15.3 billion back in 2017. For Google, it is the largest acquisition the search giant has ever made, more than double its record purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012.

In May, Wiz, which says that its cyber platform is tailored to secure everything developers build and run in the cloud, was valued at a whopping $12 billion after closing its last funding round of $1 billion.

The cybersecurity unicorn was established in early 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic started gaining pace around the world, sending entire enterprises and workers online and spurring a huge migration wave to cloud-based servers. With hybrid work now standard and digital transformation moving data centers to the cloud, businesses face heightened network security risks, including sophisticated ransomware, malware and other breaches, which in turn bolstered demand for Wiz’s cloud-based cybersecurity solutions powered by artificial intelligence.