Google to acquire Wiz - the company's most expensive deal to date
Google announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wiz, Inc., a leading cloud security platform headquartered in New York, for US$ 32 billion, in an all-cash transaction. Once closed, Wiz will join Google Cloud.
Google said this acquisition represents an investment by Google Cloud to accelerate two large and growing trends in the AI era: improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds (multi-cloud).
Industry analysts are of the view Google’s deal to acquire Wiz has been to shrink the gap with Amazon and Microsoft’s ever-growing cloud computing businesses.
Since the company's inception, in January 2020, they have followed a very proactive approach to protecting their intellectual property - this can be seen in the rapid growth in the patent portfolio. Currently, their patent portfolio consists of 57 patent families, 71 application patents, and 24 granted patents (as of Jun 2024). The bulk of their portfolio has been filed with the US patent office. International protection is progressing, and they have filed 17 WO applications, with Canada the first country with an active application.
Wiz has an increase number of applications being filed since 2020 - an indication of a healthy "innovation pipeline". The recency of their patent applications affords the company with many years of IP protection.
Examination of Wiz's patent portfolio clearly demonstrates cloud security is a core component for the business.
- detecting vulnerabilities in configuration code of a cloud environment utilizing infrastructure as code
- system and method for analyzing network objects in a cloud environment
- techniques for multi-tenant vulnerability scanning
- static analysis techniques for determining reachability properties of network and computing objects
As Google seeks to close the gap with AWS and Microsoft, Wiz offers not just strong cloud security tech, but a growing patent portfolio that could support broader platform differentiation in the years to come.
Sources:
Google announces agreement to acquire Wiz: https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/google-agreement-acquire-wiz/