How Does Wiz Make Money: $1B+ ARR, Per-Workload Pricing, and the $32B Google Deal

$32 billion is what Google paid to acquire Wiz when the deal closed on March 11, 2026 — the largest acquisition in Google's 27-year history and the biggest pure cybersecurity transaction ever recorded. That's the short answer. The longer answer is that Wiz never charged customers for seats or licenses at all — it charged for every cloud workload it protected across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and that pricing model is exactly what took it from zero to over $1 billion in ARR in under six years.

Wiz was co-founded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik — the same four founders who built Adallom and sold it to Microsoft in 2015. This time, instead of selling early, they built the fastest company in software history to reach $100 million in ARR, turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google in 2024, then agreed to sell for $32 billion a year later once revenue had roughly tripled. Here's exactly how the money works.

How does Wiz make money

Wiz makes money by charging enterprises to continuously scan and protect the cloud workloads they run across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — servers, containers, storage buckets, and identities — rather than charging per employee seat like traditional SaaS. Its published starter tiers price Wiz Essential at roughly $24,000 per year for 100 protected workloads and Wiz Advanced at around $38,000 for the same footprint with deeper detection, while median customer spend across all deals lands near $111,500 per year according to Vendr's procurement data.

Larger accounts don't buy off the list price at all. Enterprise contracts are custom-negotiated and often anchor pricing to a percentage of the customer's total cloud infrastructure spend across all three hyperscalers, with additional detection modules — container security, identity risk, AI workload scanning — bundled or priced separately depending on deal size. That workload-based, multi-cloud pricing is the reason Wiz scaled so fast: it doesn't require ripping out an existing vendor, and the bill grows automatically as a customer's cloud footprint grows, so expansion revenue compounds without a single additional sales call.

The $32 billion Google deal, explained

Google first offered Wiz roughly $23 billion in cash in mid-2024; Rappaport turned it down, betting the company could grow into a bigger number on its own. He was right — by the time Google came back with a $32 billion all-cash offer in March 2025, Wiz had scaled past $700 million in ARR and the deal represented roughly 2.7x its last private valuation of $12 billion from a May 2024 funding round.

The transaction took a full year to clear regulators, closing on March 11, 2026 after unconditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice, the European Commission, and antitrust authorities in Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Türkiye. For context on how acquisitions this size get priced and structured, see our AI valuations dashboard and how Scale AI's $14.3B Meta stake compares as a structurally different kind of mega-deal.

Figures blended from Cleary Gottlieb, TechCrunch, SecurityWeek, and public deal filings. Regulatory review timelines are approximate, measured from public announcement to close.

Wiz vs CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Orca Security

Wiz competes in the cloud-native application protection platform category — CNAPP — against Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud, CrowdStrike's Falcon Cloud Security, and smaller multi-cloud specialist Orca Security. Wiz's pitch has always been agentless scanning: it reads cloud configuration and workload metadata directly from the provider's APIs rather than requiring an agent installed on every server, which cuts deployment time from months to hours and was the single biggest reason it outgrew incumbents that still required agent rollouts.

That competitive dynamic doesn't disappear now that Wiz sits inside Google Cloud — regulators specifically required Wiz to remain available and interoperable on AWS and Azure, not just GCP, which is why the deal cleared without a divestiture. Enterprises running multi-cloud environments can still buy Wiz independent of any Google Cloud spend, meaning it keeps competing head-to-head with Palo Alto and CrowdStrike for the same CNAPP budget line even under new ownership.

Why Google paid 32x revenue for a security startup

At $1 billion-plus in ARR against a $32 billion price tag, Google paid roughly 32x trailing revenue for Wiz — a steep multiple even in a market where AI and infrastructure companies routinely trade above 20x. The premium reflects two things: Wiz's growth rate hadn't slowed even as it scaled past $500 million ARR, and Google Cloud desperately needed a credible answer to Microsoft's Defender for Cloud and AWS's native security tooling that enterprise CISOs would actually trust across non-Google infrastructure.

Buying an independent, already-trusted multi-cloud brand solved a problem Google couldn't solve by building in-house — no security team wants their multi-cloud posture monitored by a tool built by one of the clouds it's supposed to be watching objectively. For more on how growth-stage software companies get priced against revenue multiples like this, see our SaaS valuations dashboard.

What happens to Wiz's business model inside Google Cloud

Wiz is operating as a standalone product line within Google Cloud rather than being absorbed and rebuilt, keeping its existing pricing, sales team, and product roadmap intact for at least the near term — the same playbook Google used with Mandiant after its $5.4 billion acquisition in 2022. Existing customers on AWS and Azure keep their current contracts, and new deals continue to be priced per protected workload rather than shifting to a Google Cloud consumption model.

The bigger financial question is what Wiz's revenue looks like folded into Alphabet's segment reporting going forward — Google Cloud disclosed $185 billion in planned 2026 infrastructure capex, and Wiz's roughly $1 billion in ARR is now a rounding error on that scale, even though it was the largest security acquisition in history. What matters more for founders and investors is the signal: Google will pay a premium multiple for infrastructure-layer software with genuine multi-cloud trust, a bar most category leaders never clear.

Wiz's funding rounds and the VCs who backed the $32B exit

Wiz raised roughly $1.9 billion in venture capital before the Google acquisition, across rounds led by Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cyberstarts, and Thrive Capital. The company hit a $1 billion Series D in February 2023 at a $10 billion valuation, then closed a further $1 billion round in May 2024 at $12 billion — the round that set the private valuation baseline Google's $32 billion offer had to beat by nearly 3x.

For early backers like Index and Sequoia, a $32 billion exit on a company founded in 2020 is one of the fastest large-scale cybersecurity returns in venture history, on par with the multiples that made Founders Fund's SpaceX bet a category-defining outcome — a reminder that the biggest venture returns still cluster around infrastructure companies that solve a problem every large enterprise has to pay for, not just consumer AI hype. It's also a data point every fund raising a new vehicle right now points to when pitching LPs on why cybersecurity and infrastructure deserve dedicated allocation; see our VC performance dashboard for how exits like this move fund-level DPI.