For a company that made its fortune dishing up answers, Google is surprisingly coy when the questions relate to its own finances. The search-engine giant is paying $32bn to acquire cyber security company Wiz, reanimating a deal it first explored last July. It’s a logical move for parent company Alphabet. But like its clients’ data, the financial benefits of this purchase are stowed safely in the cloud.
Wiz has grown prodigiously by offering cyber software that maps out a company’s vulnerabilities from 30,000 feet — what tech folks refer to as an “end-to-end” approach. Its four ex-Israeli army founders took their brainchild from “annual recurring revenue” of zero in 2020 to $350mn in 2023. TD Cowen analysts reckon it grew 70 per cent in 2004; the company plans to hit $1bn at some point this year.
That is a rare feat. By way of comparison, it took security group Palo Alto Networks more than a decade from its founding to achieve a 10-digit top line. The same goes for enterprise software company Salesforce. Google boss Sundar Pichai, however, might see in Wiz a kindred spirit: the search behemoth he runs managed it in five years.