In the huge acquisition deal by Google, Wiz’s four founders Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik, who are believed to hold about 9% of the company each, will each receive $2.9 billion before tax, assuming that the deal overcomes all the regulatory hurdles.
Next come the venture capita funds that invested $21 million in Wiz in February 2020: Gili Raanan’s Cyberstarts and Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest venture capital firms in the world and one of the early investors in Google and Cisco. These two VCs are estimated to have held 10% of Wiz at the launch date. They have sold some shares along the way, but have still retained a fairly high 8-9% stake, having made follow-on investments of hundreds of millions of dollar each.
Wiz’s 1,800 employees (a third of them in Israel) hold options representing 10% of the company altogether. In addition, sources inform “Globes”, under the sale agreement, the employees will receive a retention bonus amounting to a total of about $1 billion.
The state will also rake in a tidy sum, although the calculation is somewhat complicated. The current Israeli shareholders are the founders, 250 of the workers, and the Cyberstarts and Cerca VC firms, which hold about 45% of the company and will be the main source of tax revenue.
The foreign investors, chiefly international venture capital firms, are mostly exempt from tax in Israel. Only their Israel representatives will be liable to tax on their success fees.
A challenge for the Israel Tax Authority lies in the fact that most of Wiz’s intellectual property belongs to the US company Wiz Inc., of which the Israel development center is a subsidiary. The Authority can embark on a special assessment on the grounds that a substantial portion of the intellectual property was developed in Israel, but that is a complicated procedure that could result in loss of revenue to the state. When Waze was acquired a decade ago, the transfer of intellectual property to the US yielded tax amounting to NIS 800 million, whereas from the sale itself the state pocketed only NIS 500 million. The current deal, which is 25 times the size, presents similar challenges, but on a far larger scale.
Tax experts consulted by “Globes” estimate the state’s total revenue from the deal at NIS 12 billion on a conservative basis, and up to NIS 18 billion at the high end. That is equivalent to the annual revenue from 2% in VAT. When negotiations were underway on Google’s previous bid for Wiz last year, the prime minister’s economic adviser Prof. Avi Simhon suggested that the 1% hike in the rate of VAT from 17% to 18% already planned for the beginning of this year (and now implemented) could be canceled if the deal went ahead. Now that there is a deal, it remains to wonder whether such a proposal will be raised again.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 19, 2025.
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