Google plans to acquire cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion in the search giant’s largest-ever acquisition.
In a vacuum, that’s stunning, but it’s even more so in context. The last couple years have been an exhaustingly stalled time for venture capital-backed companies looking for a big ticket exit. Under former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, acquisitions by Big Tech became a hazy exit lane because of antitrust concerns. Meanwhile, economic considerations and geopolitical pressures mostly froze the IPO market.
Cybersecurity was a sector that saw some acquisitions and even the occasional IPO amid broader industry consolidation (Wiz itself did a number of acquisitions in 2024, including Dazz and Gem Security). At the same time, Wiz’s fortunes have risen in tandem with the increasing importance of cybersecurity across the global economy—as cyberattacks increased, so has investment in cybersecurity companies.
In short, Wiz, founded about five years ago, is both riding the cybersecurity and cloud adoption waves and has simultaneously defied the exit odds. The blockbuster deal, by extension, presents more questions than answers for the broader landscape.
The first question is perhaps the most obvious: Is Big Tech M&A back? During her tenure, Khan actively blocked Big Tech deals large and small, from Meta’s acquisition of VR company Within (deal value was reported at $400 million) to Microsoft’s $69 billion mega-deal for Activision Blizzard. Under the Trump administration, is it now open season for major deals? Or will another FTC-sized hammer drop?
This leads implicitly to a second question: Is Wiz a one-off? There are certainly signs the broader environment for tech is warming, especially given Klarna and CoreWeave’s recent IPO filings in quick succession. And Rubrik’s IPO last year and a steady stream of smaller intra-industry cybersecurity deals proves that cybersecurity is still hot.
But here is the situation where Wiz is fundamentally a one-off—that other cybersecurity companies now look at Wiz and have higher expectations of what an exit might look like, expectations prospective buyers aren’t willing to meet. In other words, Wiz isn’t the bellwether for the industry so much as an incredibly successful anomaly.
In that sense, Wiz’s high-flying outcome presents more questions than answers for the broader ecosystem—for now.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com