.On July 23rd, media reported that Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz rejected an acquisition offer of up to 23 billion dollars from Google's parent company Alphabet, choosing instead to focus on advancing the company's original IPO plan.

According to an internal memo from Wiz cited by the media, the company's CEO, Assaf Rappaport, stated, "Rejecting such a humbling offer is difficult, but with our excellent team, I am confident in making this choice." He continued to say that the company decided to continue focusing on advancing the original IPO plan, aiming to achieve 1 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue.

Alphabet's failed acquisition of Wiz is likely due to concerns over antitrust scrutiny. During the Biden administration, the antitrust environment in the United States has become very strict. In the past few years, several large mergers and acquisitions have been rejected by the courts, including those involving Nvidia and Arm, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, and JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.

In the current environment, Alphabet is already a target of market regulation, and acquiring a cybersecurity giant like Wiz could likely attract more scrutiny from antitrust authorities regarding its own business.

Over the past few years, Google has been troubled by these reviews—the U.S. Department of Justice has continuously accused it of abusing its dominant position in the search field and has sued it for illegally monopolizing the digital advertising market. In the ongoing negotiations with regulatory bodies, Alphabet has been exhausted.

In recent years, Google has invested heavily in cloud security. Two years ago, Google acquired cybersecurity firm Mandiant for 5.4 billion dollars, the second-largest acquisition in Google's history. With Mandiant's help, at a conference held in Las Vegas this year, Google proudly demonstrated how to use its Gemini artificial intelligence model to help customers analyze threats and resolve potential vulnerabilities, greatly enhancing its reputation in cloud security.

Originally, Alphabet hoped to enhance Google's capabilities in cybersecurity by acquiring Wiz at twice its valuation, which is a key part of its strategy to capture market share in the cloud computing field. In this market, Google still lags behind Amazon and Microsoft, but the search giant has gradually taken a foothold, and the department achieved profitability for the first time last year.

It is understood that Wiz was founded by several founders who, before founding Wiz, jointly founded the cloud security company Adallom and sold it to Microsoft for 320 million dollars. After working at Microsoft for a few years, the founders established Wiz again. According to Wiz's official website, its turnover in 2023 was about 350 million dollars, and it cooperated with 40% of the Fortune Global 500 companies. Wiz has about 900 employees in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Israel, and plans to add 400 employees worldwide in 2024.

Wiz announced in May this year that it had completed a round of private financing, raising 1 billion dollars, and the company's valuation reached 12 billion dollars. To date, Wiz has reached cooperation with many cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, etc., and its customers also include well-known companies such as Morgan Stanley and DocuSign.

Today, Google's parent company Alphabet will announce its second-quarter financial report after the U.S. stock market closes, and the market will focus on how AI technology empowers the company's advertising and search business growth, the growth trend of cloud business, capital expenditure plans, and shareholder return. According to Visible Alpha statistics, analysts expect Google to achieve revenue of 84.288 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2024, a year-on-year increase of 12.98%; earnings per share may reach 1.84 dollars, a year-on-year increase of 27.71%.