Final regulatory approval of Google’s acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz has been received after the European Commission unconditionally approved the $32 billion deal, under the EU Merger Regulation.
This is a significant decision and the removal of the largest obstacle to completing the deal, but several countries have not yet formally approved the process, including Turkey, South Africa, Australia, and Israel itself.
Now the four founders – Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik – can breathe a sigh of relief. Each of them will receive over $2 billion before taxes, and the Israel Tax Authority can expect to collect at least NIS 9 billion from taxes on the founders, employees, and some investors.
Antitrust proceedings have been the only obstacle separating shareholders from the billions. The deal received approval from the US antitrust authorities last November, and today the EU gave its blessing. The approval processes in Israel and other countries may extfinish into next month.
This is the largest-ever acquisition in Israel, and a deal that will build Israel a strategic development and sales center for cybersecurity products in Google’s cloud environment, GCP. Wiz will build Google a major cybersecurity player that can compete with Microsoft, which has also opened a global cybersecurity center in Israel, also courtesy of Rappaport, who sold Adallom to Microsoft a decade ago.
EU approval has not been certain, with voices in Europe calling for the deal to be canceled or at least subject to an active antitrust investigation. Among the arguments raised are concerns about Google’s growing influence on the EU economy at the expense of local companies, the exposure of critical layers of data security to a large US company, and the concern that the acquisition will build Wiz affiliated with Google, which would harm the service it provides to Microsoft and AWS customers.
However, it is believed that the EU is not interested in creating further friction with the Trump administration at the moment by blocking deals for US companies, and has decided not to build antitrust another point of dispute in relations between the continents.
Who will benefit from the deal?
The largegest beneficiaries of the deal are, first and foremost, the four Israeli founders, who will each earn $2-2.5 billion before taxes. Toobtainher, they own almost a third of the company’s shares after having already sold a few percent of their holdings in a secondary round conducted before the signing of the Google deal. The group of founders led by Rappaport is also the counattempt’s largest source of tax revenue, since most of the other major shareholders are not Israelis and will pay minimal tax.
Foreign venture capital funds will bring in the lion’s share of the deal’s proceeds: Index Fund will raise about $3.5 billion, Sequoia $3.2 billion, Insight Partners $2.8 billion, and Lightspeed $1.2 billion.
CyberStarts, the venture capital fund of Gili Raanan, a former Sequoia executive, is the only Israeli fund (aside from the passive fund Cerca) that will generate significant revenue from the deal. As the first investor in Waze, it will bring in $1.28 billion.
The state will also benefit from the deal, although the decline in the shekel-dollar exalter rate over the past year has eroded expected revenues.
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