Google’s second attempt to acquire cloud security firm Wiz is going a lot better than the first, with the Department of Justice clearing the $32 billion deal, which ranks as Google’s largest-ever acquisition.
Wiz CEO and cofounder Assaf Rappaport confirmed that the DoJ had approved Google’s acquisition of Wiz after an antitrust investigation yesterday. At a Wall Street Journal Tech Live event, Rappaport told attendees that the DoJ’s clearance was an important step, but hardly the final word.
“In the last eight months I’ve spent a lot of time with governments and regulators, and the ‘S’ is important,” Rappaport said. “This is an important milestone, but we’re still in the journey between signing and closing.”
Google announced its intention to acquire Wiz in March of this year in an all-cash deal at the aforementioned $32 billion price point with plans to fold the biz into Google Cloud after the acquisition is complete.
Google noted in a separate announcement that Wiz’s flagship offering – a unified cloud security platform that puts “all major clouds and code environments” behind a single dashboard – is different from the cloud security services the company currently offers, making the acquisition a natural fit.
Wiz uses an API to connect to customer cloud environments, allowing it to perform a full-stack inventory that accounts for everything from cloud architecture to serverless functions to containers, buckets, and other resources. Users can query relationships between different scanned elements to see how various assets connect and how a breach in one space can impact other systems, and matches scans up to a threat intelligence database to inform customers what sort of risks their various interconnected cloud services expose their businesses to.
As Google Cloud noted in its March blog post, its Mandiant platform, Security Operations, and Threat Intelligence platforms can do some of that, but Wiz’s platform goes a step further in providing comprehensive cloud security visibility.
Google and Wiz are both US companies, Rappaport said, but because the pair do business around the world, the UK, EU, Japan, and other governments still need to clear the deal based on their own interpretation of what would constitute an unfair consolidation of market power at Google.
Rappaport said that the DoJ and other antitrust regulators have been incredibly thorough, talking to both Wiz customers and others inside the verticals the combined pair would operate in to get a sense of the state of the industry and whether Wiz’s bringing its multicloud security visibility platform under Google Cloud’s control would be unfair.
While the Department of Justice hasn’t made a public statement on the matter or confirmed completion of the probe to The Register, Google confirmed to us that it and Wiz are now moving on to worrying about what other jurisdictions have to say about the deal.
“Increasing access to multicloud security solutions, as this acquisition will do, will provide businesses and governments more choice in how they protect themselves,” a Google spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement. “We look forward to completing the review process in other jurisdictions.”
This isn’t the first time Google attempted to scoop Rappaport’s company up. The search giant tried to do so in 2024 as well, but the Wiz CEO walked away from Google’s prior offer of $23 billion with the intention to go public instead of becoming a Google subsidiary.
“Saying no to such humbling offers is tough,” Rappaport said in an email to Wiz employees in June 2024, “but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.”
Half a year and an offer sweetened by nine billion dollars later, Rappaport has changed his tune. Wiz never filed that IPO in the intervening months. ®