It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
If they don’t, they risk destroying the very advantage that made Wiz valuable in the first place.
Then Google will buy them too.
Instead, it looks like all the existing incumbents will just continue to rule over society. They have capital, monopolies, and the moats of distribution channels and contracts with their current customers. There is no fair competition - they’ll just replicate your clever product easily.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...
> Two security executives told Forbes they rejected overtures from Raanan’s team after hearing about the firm’s “menu” of compensation. “I was completely aghast. It was against my principles,” one said.
The system working as intended.
“Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel
Israeli VCs tend to be uninterested in IPOs in general - too much of an operational headache and it's difficult to exit a position quickly.
In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control. It's basically the "Rich versus Kings" dichotomy [0].
Edit: can't reply
> you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power
Investors do not like that - they want some degree of operational control in order to right the ship if needed.
In the early 2010s, IPOs like Tesla and Facebook were on terms that gave outside investors little control on operations and that's why Musk and even Zuckerberg to a certain extent can choose to reorient to a new boondoggle with little-to-no investor pushback.
In 2026 if you want to IPO, it will be on the terms of JPMC, GS, etc who are underwriting the IPO.
In a private company, it's easier for an investor to offload or get bought out of their position if the founder wants to maintain operational control.
> While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show
In publicly listed companies, it is magnitudes more difficult to build a board that is aligned with you at a personal level versus in a private company because both the board and strategic shareholders will act as checks against you.
> If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise
An acquisition happens when both the founders and investors want to exit, and has less operational overhead and due dilligence versus going thru the process of an IPO in the US.
> This is counterintuitive to me
Well, that's the reality. This is why Stripe, Databricks, and others have remained private for so long despite having hit IPO-level metrics years ago. If you're already generating high 9 to low 10 figures a year in revenue, you can remain private indefinetly and as a founder you would be able to give yourself a compensation package comparable to a public company, but with much less oversight and stress.
> Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets
Significantly less capital.
"Big" funds like YL Ventures, Cyberstarts, and JVP only have an AUM of $800M, $1.4B, and $1.9B respectively.
And if you were going to IPO in the US anyhow, why would you even invest in an Israeli fund, which wouldn't have enough people with experience for an IPO.
And the handful of Israeli IPOs that happened like SentinelOne or CyberArk weren't that successful.
Is that the kind of integration you are refering to?
Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets?
1 2
1 6
1 @
28 A
15 B
8 C
18 D
6 E
10 F
10 G
4 H
9 I
5 J
5 K
8 L
14 M
8 N
10 O
22 P
4 Q
13 R
27 S
12 T
3 U
5 V
9 W
1 Y
8 Z
Normalizing these counts with respect to English character frequencies that appear in text[2], the top three unexpected company initials appear to be "Q", "J", and "P".[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
AWS and GCP also made a joint announcement about multi cloud networking for a similar reason
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...
This is counterintuitive to me.
If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise.
With an IPO it seems like you have a better chance to retain control: you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power. While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show, at least until the board runs out of patience with bad earnings.
I bet someone has actually studied the effect of leading letters in startup names and funding & acquisitions, I vaguely seem to remember a story about it in the past.
I'm curious how much of that information is going to pass between Wiz and Google Cloud product/sales. It's effectively x-ray vision into some huge workloads running on their competitors.
They grossly overpaid if they aren't keeping it cloud agnostic. It's impressive software, but if it's only compatible with GCP it will not survive in this space.
> Thiel is an idiot
Sounds more like he's selfish, perhaps to an unusual degree. Monopoly is great for the monopolist. For everyone else? Not so much.
That said: the goal with Google M&A remains the same as always. Take competition off the board. I don't know this company or how they compete with Google, but 80% chance that's the play.
They are culturally incapable of merging other people's tech into their own stack and have both the tendency to rewrite everything from scratch on their own bespoke technologies and also internal engineering teams that will bristle at having a foreign body invade their cathedral.
You could say it would be talent acquisition but most everyone who comes from a startup walks as soon as their golden handcuffs loosen and they can find something else to do. Going from startup to Google is usually torturous.
Been through this 15 years ago. I don't think anything has changed.
You don’t really see companies under $10 billion going public anymore. That may continue to be the case, but it’s terrible for entrepreneurs.
I wonder if there are antitrust lawyers watching this closely. Would be really interesting to get their perspective on this.
Google Security Center Wiz Google Agentic Wiz Security
A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money
Apparently the cybersec bigwigs at our company love it, but for me I have to write a detailed explaination why another 'incident report' the clueless cybersecurity guys keep bothering me with is actually nonsense.
I don't think that's true here (what is the competing google product exactly?) or generally in cloud acquisitions, that generally buy into their platform missing features
In Israel, the university you attended matters less than the unit you served. For example, if you want to become a senior politician, you join Sayeret Matkal and if you want to become an academic you end up in Talpiot (which the founders of Wiz are alums of).
8200s success is largely due to a couple early exits by 8200 alums (Gili Raanan, Nir Zuk, Shlomo Kramer) who were biased in recruiting from their unit. 8200 alums aren't better or worse than other Israelis - they just have a better network.
And Israel has multiple SIGINT and offensive/defensive cybersecurity units, all of whom created similar networks as well.
Like how ‘X’ attracts marketing and typographic knuckle-draggers in English, or how all our AI companies have butthole logos for reasons that only make sense if you understand the underlying companies and culture.
While it helps, it doesn't take a genius to tell the difference. Picking the great from the great apart, that'd be another story all together.
There's 5 of them, two of which happen to have been acquired by Google. Fair to say it's likely a coincidence.
Interestingly, they all use "vav vav" as the start of their Hebrew names. "Vav" is the hebrew letter for V, so it's kind of like using VV to represent W.
Maybe you're right, and it's a stylistic thing! My knowledge of Hebrew ends in Hebrew school, and that mostly focused on blessing and prayers over startup naming.
Nearly a year ago, we shared that Wiz would be joining Google. At the time, we spoke about a belief that by bringing together Wiz’s innovation and Google’s scale, we could meaningfully change what security looks like in the cloud.
Today, as we officially begin our journey as a Google company, that belief feels real in a much deeper way. Not because of what has changed, but because of what has stayed true.
Our mission remains bold and unwavering: to help every organization protect everything they build and run. What has changed is the world around us. Now, we must do this at the speed of AI.
Cloud once transformed how fast teams could build. AI is doing it again, unlocking a new era of innovation where applications move from idea to production in minutes. Generative AI is no longer experimental; it’s becoming a core part of how modern organizations build, ship, and scale.
Customers are leaning into this moment, using AI to move faster, create more, and reimagine what’s possible. But building at this pace requires a new approach to security – one that keeps up with change and supports innovation rather than slows it down.
At Wiz, we believe security should accelerate progress. By combining deep understanding of cloud environments with rich context across code, cloud, and runtime, we enable teams to build AI-powered applications securely from the start and strengthen them continuously as they evolve.
Today’s security leaders are focused on enabling the business, supporting rapid innovation while staying ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats. With Wiz, they don’t have to choose between speed and security.
In this environment, velocity is everything. At Wiz, it’s our mantra; we’re committed to helping customers turn that speed into a lasting edge – building boldly, securely, and with confidence.
During the acquisition process, our wizards never stopped building. In the past year, we hit many major milestones thanks to their grit and determination.
Wiz Research continues to be at the forefront of security, uncovering critical vulnerabilities that protect not just Wiz customers, but the industry at large. This work highlights the systemic risks inherent in the digital age, with discoveries like:
An exposed database in Moltbook, a viral social network for AI agents, that leaked millions of API keys and underscored the security implications of vibe coded applications.
CodeBreach, a critical supply chain vulnerability that could have compromised the AWS Console.
RediShell, a 13-year-old critical RCE flaw in Redis (CVSS 10.0) that impacted over 75% of cloud environments.
NVIDIAScape, a container escape vulnerability that threatened shared AI infrastructure.
A collaboration with vibe coding leader Lovable to harden their platform and protect the next generation of AI-generated applications (where Wiz found that 1 in 5 organizations are exposed to systemic risks).
The discovery and remediation of a sophisticated wave of supply chain attacks, including Shai-Hulud and NX, where our research protected hundreds of organizations from highly targeted, evolving threats.
To push the boundaries of innovation even further, we also hosted ZeroDay.cloud, a first-of-its-kind hacking competition where the world's top researchers uncovered a record number of CVEs in foundational cloud and AI tools.
These milestones represent our unwavering commitment to securing the open-source and multicloud infrastructure underpinning the modern world.
Product innovation has always been at the heart of Wiz, and over the past year, our momentum has only accelerated.
As customers build and ship faster in the AI era, we expanded the Wiz AI Security Platform to secure AI applications themselves, providing visibility into AI usage, preventing AI-native risks, and protecting AI workloads in runtime.
We introduced Wiz Exposure Management to give teams a single, proactive view of risk -- unifying vulnerability and attack surface management from code to cloud to on-prem, so they can focus on what truly matters and proactively remove exploitable risk.
We pushed the boundaries of automation with AI Security Agents, purpose-built to help teams investigate, prioritize, and remediate risk at machine speed, powered by deep context across code, cloud, and runtime.
And to help developers start secure by default, we launched WizOS: hardened, near-zero-CVE container base images that give teams a trusted foundation from the very first commit.
These are just a few highlights from a year of relentless building, and we’re only getting started.
Now, as one team with Google Cloud, we have the opportunity to accelerate our roadmap in ways that simply weren’t possible before. By integrating the most cutting edge AI capabilities into the Wiz platform, we’ll continue to give security teams new superpowers. In the coming days, we’ll share more about how we’re already working with Gemini, and what the next phase of this partnership will unlock.
But one thing is not changing: Wiz remains a multi-cloud platform. Today, we work with most of the Fortune 100, and most of the Frontier AI labs, as well as many of the world’s fastest-growing, cloud-native companies. Our customers run on AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. Our goal is to protect their entire environment – every workload, every application, every major cloud.
Joining Google doesn’t narrow our focus. It strengthens it. With Google’s infrastructure, Mandiant’s threat intelligence, and the broader Google Unified Security Platform and ecosystem, we can protect customers better – wherever they build.
Trust is something we earn every day. And we intend to prove it through our actions, our product, and our pace of innovation.
To our customers: thank you for your trust. You challenge us to solve the hardest problems in security, and you are the reason we build.
To the Wiz team: I may be CEO in title, but you are the ones who lead. Thank you for your dedication, your care, and your belief in what we’re making together.
Our mission remains as bold as ever: to protect everything organizations build and run.
And we are still just getting started.
From code to cloud to AI, get a firsthand look at how Wiz helps you build, ship, and run securely, regardless of where your workloads live.
Your work email here
In any case, I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence, I don't think it's a stylistic thing, unless I'm missing something.