Tech giant Google usually gets its way, but sometimes things go wrong. Google tried to acquire Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for a staggering amount. But CEO and founder Assaf Rappaport (40) prefers to keep the reins in his own hands.
“Saying ‘no’ to such honorable offers is difficult, but with our exceptional team I feel confident in that choice.”
With those words, CEO Assaf Rappaport explained his decision to Wiz employees that data in the cloud secured. The memo was sent to the entire company and was viewed by the financial press agency Bloomberg. It is therefore not everyday that the CEO of a tech company rejects Google, especially not when the giant comes knocking with a bag of 23 billion dollars (about 21.2 billion euros). Moreover, Google has never put so much money on the table for a company and certainly not a four-year-old start-up. “We are very flattered that such offers are coming, but we want to continue on the path that we have mapped out ourselves.”
And that path is for Rappaport: going public themselves. The company previously announced that they want to go public at 1 billion dollars in turnover. Today, that turnover is already around 500 million dollars, but Wiz is climbing quickly and could already reach the target next year. What does the company that can say ‘no’ to Google do? They specialize in cybersecurity, more specifically they can identify and remove critical risks on cloud platforms. Almost all companies that manage data in the cloud have therefore become dependent on companies like Wiz for their security. For Google, which has to compete with Microsoft and Apple, the acquisition would have been very important for that reason.
Crown
“We didn’t invent the wheel, but we did improve it,” the 40-year-old CEO says about his company. However, it was also a huge leap into the unknown for him. Four years ago, he left Microsoft to found Wiz. “A difficult choice because I really liked working for Microsoft. I still think it’s a fantastic company today. But when I started there, I had made a list for myself. There were a number of things I wanted to achieve. When the list was complete, I resigned,” he said during an interview with the financial magazine Fortune.
The entrepreneur did not know then that the corona crisis would bring half the world to a standstill a week later. “I thought I had made a big mistake, initially no one wanted to work with us. And yet, partly due to corona, a lot of things came together that helped fuel Wiz’s enormous growth.”
Gaza
Things are moving fast for Wiz. Just a year later, the company raised 250 million dollars, equivalent to more than 216 million euros. In a fourth round of capital, it quickly went to 280 million euros and the company was valued at 9.4 billion euros.
Good news, but that financing round came at an inopportune time. The war in Gaza broke out and investors were reluctant to invest in a company with offices in Tel Aviv. Rappaport therefore spoke out – cautiously – critically last year about the political decisions that were made in his country. However, the conflict and political unrest in Israel could not affect the company. In May, Wiz was able to raise no less than 1 billion dollars through a private financing round and thus also attracted the attention of Google.