“While a tough regulatory climate in 2024 had hampered such large-scale deals, Wall Street is optimistic that a shift in antitrust policies under US President Donald Trump could reignite dealmaking momentum,” Reuters wrote today.
Google reportedly agreed to a $3.2 billion breakup fee that would be paid to Wiz if the deal collapses. A Financial Times report said the breakup fee is unusually large as it represents 10 percent of the total deal value, instead of the typical 2 or 3 percent. The large breakup fee “shows how technology companies are still bracing themselves for pushback from antitrust regulators, even under President Donald Trump and his new Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson,” the article said.
Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote today that although the plan is for Wiz to become part of Google Cloud, the companies both believe that “Wiz needs to remain a multicloud platform… We will still work closely with our great partners at AWS, Azure, Oracle, and across the entire industry.”
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote that Wiz’s platform would fill a gap in Google’s security offerings. Google products already “help customers detect and respond to attackers through both SaaS-based services and cybersecurity consulting,” but Wiz is different because it “connects to all major clouds and code environments to help prevent incidents from happening in the first place,” he wrote.
“Wiz’s solution rapidly scans the customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications—along with the connections between them,” Kurian wrote. “It identifies potential attack paths, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployment. It also helps security teams collaborate with developers to remediate risks in code or detect and block ongoing attacks.”
