Biggest-ever exit: Google completes Wiz acquisition

Google has announced the completion of the acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz – the biggest-ever acquisition of an Israeli company – for $32 billion.

The acquisition was first announced on March 18 2025, and this has been followed by a year of uncertainty as to whether the deal would be approved by the US and EU regulatory authorities and whether other obstacles would be removed.

Last night Wiz celebrated the completion of the deal and its last day as a completely independent company at a special event for employees in Las Vegas.

Exceptional achievement

Google will pay $32 billion cash into the bank accounts of 29 venture capital funds, the four founders, 500 employees in Israel and 2,200 employees outside of Israel. This is an exceptional achievement for the company’s four founders: Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, who left jobs at Microsoft in 2020 during the peak of the Covid pandemic and set up their cloud security startup.

Previously they had managed Microsoft’s cybersecurity center and prior to that established Adallom, which they sold to Microsoft. They bet on the public cloud sector, which gained momentum in the days after Covid, turned the four and the company they founded into an unbeatable team, becoming a category leader and attracting huge customers and the biggest investors imaginable: giant funds like Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Sequoia and Index that invested in the company repeatedly, even when its valuation was high.

Several other Israeli investors will put many millions of dollars into their pockets following the deal: early investors in the company such as the founders of Armis, Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Yizreel; cybersecurity investor and former NBA basketball player Omri Casspi; and Merav Bahat, a friend of Assaf Rappaport and founder of Dazz, which was acquired by Wiz. This is in addition to Israeli investors who are expected to profit through their investments in venture capital funds – the main ones being the investors in the Cyberstarts fund, one of the first investors in Wiz – including Nir Zuk, Shlomo Kramer, Marius Nacht, Amichai Shulman and Miki Bodai.

The road to success

Even before the sale, Wiz was a phenomenon. It was the Israeli company with the highest growth in 2021-2022, the years of prosperity for Israeli tech, and then became the first Israeli company to raise $1 billion in one financing round.. On the road to success, Wiz surpassed dozens of startups in the field of cloud security – including Israeli companies Orca and Aqua, and US company Lacework, which almost went bankrupt. It has beaten giants like Palo Alto Networks, which does offer a rival product under the Prism brand but has failed to beat Wiz in acquiring market share. The younger and growing CrowdStrike has also had difficulty beating Wiz on its home turf.

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The big winners

The biggest winners are the four founders – Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik – who will each receive $2.2 billion, after tax, for their stakes. Hundreds of Israelis out of the company’s 500 employees in Israel are expected to become millionaires, with several dozen of them – the most senior and veteran – likely to each earn over $100 million. This could put additional pressure on housing prices in Tel Aviv, and in demand areas in Israel, as happened in Israel during the tech boom in 2020-2021.

The year-long waiting period that ended today meant a 15% reduction in the amount received from the deal for Israeli employees and investors due to the drop in the shekel-dollar exchange rate from NIS 3.67 to NIS 3.09. This will be relevant mainly to the four founders, about 500 Israeli employees, and Israeli investors such as Gili Ra’anan’s Cybertsarts Fund and Ofer Katz and Haleli Barath’s Cerca Fund. For example, each of the founders will “make do” with NIS 6.8 billion instead of NIS 8 billion after tax.

The state will also benefit from the deal, although the decline in the shekel-dollar exchange rate over the past year has hurt its ability to profit from it. According to estimates, taking into account capital gains tax and surtax that each of the four founders will pay (30% tax in total), the state is expected to earn between NIS 9 billion and NIS 9.5 billion, and taxing additional investors with a minimum tax may add several hundred million shekels, so that the income for the state may reach about NIS 10 billion.

The billions are expected to appear in the Israel Tax Authority’s bank account no later than 30 days from the date of closing the deal – during the second week of April.

Relatively independent model

From tomorrow, Wiz will become an independent division within Google Cloud and will maintain relative independence, with the four founders expected to continue to manage operations.

The fate of all the company’s employees is unclear but the company is continuing to hire additional employees even these days.

Senior executives familiar with the deal believe that the company will operate on a relatively independent model resembling LinkedIn’s activities within Microsoft. As the company promised, it will continue to serve the customers of cloud platforms that compete with Google, including Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s BaJoR, whose customers constitute the majority of Wiz’s customers.

It is difficult to assess how this balance will continue when Wiz becomes identified with Google, and according to estimates by senior executives in the cybersecurity industry, Amazon and Microsoft will make their own moves to support companies competing with Wiz.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 11, 2026.

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