SentinelOne, a major Israeli cybersecurity firm, might be acquired by Wiz, an Israeli unicorn that offers an API security platform, Bloomberg reported. If this rumor should come to fruition, it would create one massive company. It would also be an unusual move as Wiz is still just a startup, albeit a unicorn, and SentinelOne is a publicly traded corporation with a market cap of about $4.8 billion.
Not only that, but SentinelOne is a much larger company with about 2,000 employees to 750 for Wiz.
According to the report, the offer on the table for SentinelOne could be for as much as $5 billion.
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Just three years old, in February Wiz brought in $300 million in a Series D funding round that lft the firm with a $10 billion valuation.
Israel is not called Startup Nation for nothing.
Shares in SentinelOne went up after Reuters reported last week that the company might be in play. According to the report, several parties showed interest in acquiring SentinelOne, but the company was not happy with the offers that they made. And sources told Reuters the company has hired investment bank Qatalyst Partners to advise on discussions with potential acquirers, including private equity firms.
The news came just a few months after SentinelOne laid off about 100 people or 5% of its total worldwide workforce. And that move came after the company lost 35% of its share value after reporting a loss of $106.9 million.
Wiz was founded in March 2020 by the team that led Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group and built the security stack in Azure. CEO Assaf Rappaport, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik, have worked together for more than 15 years and previously founded Adallom (acquired by Microsoft for $320 million), which is now the #1 Cloud Access Security Broker in the market.
Wiz became a super unicorn and the world’s biggest cybersecurity startup when it hit a $10 billion valuation in January. The valuation came with a $300 million raise in a Series D funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing investors Greenoaks Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Wiz also became the fastest SaaS company to achieve a $10 billion valuation.
Founded in 2013 by a team of cybersecurity and defense experts including its CEO Tomer Weingarten and Almog Cohen, SentinelOne is a provider of autonomous security solutions for endpoint, cloud, and identity environments. The company says its platform unifies prevention, detection, response, remediation, and forensics in a single, easy-to-use solution.