Bas' Take on Tech: Alphabet's (Google) largest takeover
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🤖 Apple, Microsoft bringing AI to end user devices
Alphabet is in advanced negotiations to acquire the cybersecurity start-up Wiz. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal. The purchase price is around 23 billion US dollars.
It would be the largest takeover of the internet company Alphabet, Google's parent company. Wiz, founded in Israel in 2020 by CEO Assaf Rappaport and now based in New York, is one of the fastest-growing software start-ups in the world. Wiz offers cybersecurity products for cloud-based development work with real-time threat detection based on artificial intelligence. Rappaport was General Manager at Microsoft Israel.
Wiz was valued at 12 billion US dollars in a financing round at the beginning of the year and received one billion US dollars. The backers include well-known investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Wiz has its own cloud data centers worldwide. A new location in Dubai, UAE, was recently announced. As of February 2024, Wiz had around 900 employees, with most sales and marketing staff based in North America and Europe, while developers are based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Wiz works with most services from market-leading cloud Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Google is in third place in cloud computing behind Amazon and Microsoft. Last year, revenue in Google's cloud business increased by 26% and the division reported an operating profit for the first time.
📰 Other readings
Linus Torvalds says RISC-V will make the same mistakes as Arm and x86
AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach
🚀 What else?
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