Alphabet is reportedly eyeing its biggest acquisition in history

Wiz bid

Google’s parent company Alphabet is looking to lock down a $23 billion deal for cybersecurity software startup Wiz, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The potential acquisition, which would be the largest in the company’s history, comes just a few weeks after Alphabet walked away from deal talks with marketing software company HubSpot, which has a market cap of $24 billion.

Wiz, which bills itself as the #1 cloud security platform and counts 40% of Fortune 100 companies as users, recently raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation in May, as it looked to expand ahead of a rumored IPO. Just over 2 months later, however, the company looks likely to become another property in Alphabet’s ever-expanding empire, at nearly twice its previous valuation.

GOOG gang

If the deal goes through, Wiz would join a long list of acquisitions made by the tech giant: according to Crunchbase, Google has bought 264 businesses through the years, the most of any of its big tech peers. While the vast majority of those will be relative unknowns to the general public, some have become household names.

Alphabet’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube back in 2006, for example, now looks like a master stroke, with the video-sharing platform bringing in $8.1 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Conversely, Motorola Mobility, the company’s biggest acquisition to date, fared a lot worse under the Alphabet umbrella — Google’s parent got rid of the phone-maker for $2.9 billion just ~2 years after acquiring it for $12.5 billion, in a “gargantuan mistake that only Google could afford to make”, according to Time.

It’s impossible to say where we’ll place the $23 billion Wiz deal on the YouTube-to-Motorola scale in a decade’s time, but with two deals in completely different industries — both with $20 billion+ price tags — discussed in the last few months, Alphabet’s clearly ready to get something major done.