Google parent Alphabet and cybersecurity company Wiz have ended takeover talks. The tech giant even put forward a $23 billion offer for the Israeli company, which would have been the largest outlay in the search group’s history.
According to several American media outlets, both companies have already informed their employees that the talks are over. With the purchase, Google hoped to continue to increase competition with Microsoft and Amazon for cloud services, Wiz’s specialty. The company’s platform analyses the infrastructures of the main companies that offer this type of remote computing and detects risk factors that could lead to cyberattacks that steal data.
“Saying no to such generous offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that decision,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said in his communication to employees, reported by the agency. BloombergThe company, founded in 2020, had valued the company at around $12 billion just a couple of months ago in its last round of investment. Google was willing to double that amount to acquire it.
The purchase would have been well above the $1.7 billion Google paid for YouTube in 2006, or the more recent $5 billion it put on the table for Mandiant, another cybersecurity company. The scale of the move had drawn the attention of analysts, as Google already faces scrutiny from competition regulators in the EU and the US, where the Justice Department has filed two lawsuits against the company for abuse of a dominant position, one over its influence in the search market and another over its practices with digital advertising.
As reported by the Financial Timesnegotiations broke down after some members of the boards of Alphabet and Wiz expressed skepticism that the deal would be approved by regulators. Once the deal became public, factions on each board lobbied against the deal, ultimately derailing it.
Source: www.eldiario.es
