Google completed its $32 billion acquisition of cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz on March 11, 2026, closing the largest acquisition in the company’s history and the biggest venture-backed startup exit ever recorded. The all-cash deal, which required regulatory clearance from authorities in the United States, European Union, and five other jurisdictions, formally brings Wiz into Google Cloud after more than a year of negotiations and antitrust review.
Wiz, headquartered in New York, provides a cloud-native security platform that monitors risk across all major cloud environments simultaneously, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The company reported approximately $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and counts roughly 45% of Fortune 100 companies among its customers. At $32 billion, the price represents a significant premium to the company’s last private valuation and a departure from the $23 billion offer Google made in 2024, which Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport declined.
A Startup Built for the Multicloud Era
Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Rappaport and three co-founders, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all veterans of Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite intelligence unit. The four had previously founded and sold Adallom, a cloud-access security company acquired by Microsoft in 2015.
Wiz grew faster than almost any enterprise software company on record. The company went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in roughly 18 months, a pace it claimed was the fastest in startup history at the time. By August 2024, ARR had surpassed $500 million, and by the end of 2025, the company crossed $1 billion. The growth was driven by the rapid expansion of multicloud infrastructure and the increasing exposure that comes with it, as enterprises spread workloads across multiple providers and AI deployments multiplied the attack surface.
Investors and Employees See Historic Returns
The deal generated some of the largest returns in venture capital history. Cyberstarts, which co-led Wiz’s $21 million seed round in 2020 at a $67 million post-money valuation, saw its initial $6.4 million investment grow to approximately $1.3 billion, a roughly 200x return. Index Ventures, which participated in every funding round and invested a total of $245 million, is on track to collect approximately $4.3 billion from the acquisition. Sequoia Capital, which held a 10% stake, stands to receive around $3.2 billion, while Insight Partners is expected to collect approximately $2.9 billion.
Wiz employees also benefited at an unusual scale. The company’s 1,800 global employees collectively held equity valued at approximately $3 billion at close. Google separately committed $1.5 billion in combined cash and stock retention bonuses for staff who remain with the company following the acquisition.
Why Google Paid a Premium
Google’s willingness to pay $32 billion for a company that had only been operating for six years reflects the strategic importance of cloud security in an era when AI workloads are running across every major platform. The global cybersecurity market is projected to grow from approximately $248 billion in 2026 to $699 billion by 2034, with multicloud security representing one of the fastest-expanding segments.
Despite joining Google Cloud, Wiz will continue to operate as a multicloud platform, remaining available to customers running workloads on AWS, Azure, and other competing infrastructure. Google made that commitment publicly during the regulatory review process, a concession that helped secure clearance from U.S. antitrust officials in November 2025 and from the European Commission in February 2026.
Rappaport has said that Wiz’s value is tied to its ability to protect customers wherever they operate, not to any single cloud provider. Joining Google Cloud while maintaining that independence is the model the company will follow going forward.
What the Deal Signals for the Startup Ecosystem
The Wiz acquisition is the clearest validation of enterprise cloud security as a standalone category since the segment began attracting serious venture capital in the late 2010s. It also confirms that the M&A market for enterprise software remains active despite the broader caution that has defined deal-making since 2022.
For early investors, the deal illustrates both the ceiling and the patience required for venture-backed exits of this scale. Cyberstarts and Index Ventures held their positions through multiple funding rounds spanning five-plus years before the acquisition closed. The $23 billion offer rejected in 2024 would have still generated substantial returns, but Wiz’s decision to hold out added more than $9 billion to the final purchase price.
For founders, the structure of the deal introduces a dynamic that is becoming more common in large acquisitions: significant retention packages alongside equity payouts. Google’s $1.5 billion commitment to keep Wiz’s team intact suggests that talent retention, not just intellectual property or market share, is a core component of what buyers are paying for.
Wiz’s acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Alphabet’s investor relations page. An investor breakdown, including comments from Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah, was published on TechCrunch on March 15.
