Google Eyes Record $23 Billion Acquisition of Cloud Security Startup Wiz

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/18/wiz-is-in-talks-to-buy-lacework-for-150-200m-security-firm-was-last-valued-at-8-3b/

- Wiz has decided to forgo a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, opting instead to pursue an initial public offering (IPO) as originally planned. - Co-founder Assaf Rappaport cited antitrust and investor concerns as key reasons for rejecting the deal, emphasizing the company's focus on achieving $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. - The decision is a setback for Google, which aimed to bolster its cloud security offerings to compete with Microsoft and Amazon. - Venture firms like Index Ventures and Sequoia, which have invested heavily in Wiz, may view the collapse of the deal as a disappointment given the rarity of high-value exits in the current market. - Wiz has shown rapid growth, hitting $350 million in annual recurring revenue in 2023, and remains committed to its IPO ambitions. Source: CNBC

@micheal_scott @unpaidintern pls check Was not able to open so don’t think it’s intended for us

Atleast not in the form it is now. Found a rare good post on LinkedIn via Twitter which lists the reason why i think so. Also, I was reading psychology of money and one of the chapters discussed how GE used to be the most valued company in 2000s and how within 20 years, everything went to manhole. Google is seriously going through a leadership crisis. I hate Pichai from the gut. We Indians like him coz he's brown munda, but I have never seen such narrow minded CEO since Balmer.

- WhizHack has secured $3 Mn in its Pre-Series A funding round from SAAA Capital, valuing the startup at $100 Mn. - The fresh capital will be used to enhance R&D through collaborations with universities in India and the US. - The startup plans to raise a larger Series A round in early 2025 to expand into North America and Europe. - WhizHack has seen over 200% annual growth in business from enterprise and government clients, and a 50X increase in shareholder value over the past three years. - Founded in November 2020, WhizHack competes with Kratikal, Hicube, and Skylark, and counts IITs, NPTI, and Microsoft among its partners. Source: Inc42

Frankly, the new now is flooded with products from Microsoft and layoffs from Google. Why is Google not able to innovate? What is that the Google lacking??

For context: Google had $305B in revenue in 2023 of which $240B (78.8%) came from advertising revenue, majorly selling to SMB. Hubspot had revenue of $2.17B from selling sales and marketing tools. One of the biggest challenges today is: - Correctly identifying who is the visitor on your website - Identifying other social signals of the reader of your content - Recording it in a streamlined way in the CRM - Retarget the same audience at a later point in time through other channels. The problem attributes towards the advertising spend directly to consumer acquisition and sales without a connection to the SMB’s CRM. If Google owned a CRM they could plumb in any Google advertising to automatically provide attribution. This would allow the SMB to have that direct proof of performance of customer acquisition and potentially sales data. The end result would be more SMB customers and larger spends by those customers. Future is in content-led inbound marketing. If the deal is successful there is a massive shift towards hyper-personalized content marketing.

I was seeing a post where Cognizent was getting acquired is it full or service lines ?