Google's bid to own enterprise cloud security

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Why Google just made Wiz its largest acquisition ever, Nvidia unveils the next generation of its GPU lineup, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

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Ease on down the road

Google Cloud has long made multicloud services a key part of its product development strategy, which makes sense when you're the third-place player in a category known as the Big Three. Tuesday's $32 billion acquisition of Wiz — a cloud security platform designed to work across all major cloud providers — will be a test of its commitment to work with its competitors and a signal of whether security trumps other considerations when it comes to buying cloud services.

Wiz turned down a $23 billion offer from Google last July, but several reports Tuesday suggested that expectations that the Trump administration will take a more hands-off approach to tech mergers — plus, you know, that additional $9 billion — sealed the deal. Wiz had raised $2 billion in funding according to Crunchbase, and saw extraordinary growth over the last five years.

• The company built a security platform that "rapidly scans the customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications – along with the connections between them," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a blog post.
• The software can identify potential threats to applications even before they are deployed, and identify the flaws most likely to cause big problems.
• It can also suggest ways that developers can fix their code in partnership with the policies set by their security organizations when incoming attacks are detected on deployed applications.
• "Wiz is an innovative leader, creating new categories of cybersecurity solutions in the last 12 months, including code-to-cloud security and cloud-native runtime defense, further strengthening its impact," Kurian wrote.

Both Google and Wiz said they will continue to support Wiz customers running applications on AWS and Microsoft Azure, but no company spends $32 billion without plans to capture new business. Security services are both a vital part of any cloud infrastructure customer's operating environment as well as a profitable business for infrastructure vendors.

• Microsoft-aligned partners interviewed by CRN saw the Wiz deal as a clear shot at Microsoft's enormous-but-shaky enterprise security business.
• "I’m not surprised Google would pay such a high price for Wiz. Microsoft has so much security and AI momentum that Google needed to do something to be more competitive," Michael Hadley, president and CEO of iCorps Technology, told CRN.
• "Google’s experience with multi-cloud offerings through previous acquisitions, such as Looker, will be beneficial. Nevertheless, delivering cloud-native security solutions on cloud platforms outside its direct control introduces an entirely new set of complexities," said Constellation Research's Chirag Mehta.

But even as Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission staffers spend most of their time doing Control-F searches for what they consider "woke" words, there's still a chance that such a massive deal — which will give Google deep insight into what its competitors' customers are running on those platforms — will face scrutiny. After all, the new DOJ is still trying to break up Google in some fashion.

• Perhaps that's why Google declared that AI and cloud computing has "dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a separate blog post.
• Semafor noted that HPE and Juniper are citing similar national-security reasons as to why the government should approve their proposed merger, which Trump's DOJ is trying to block.
• "Given the regulatory uncertainty around this acquisition, customers running workloads primarily on Azure or AWS should ensure they have clear contingency strategies to safeguard their cybersecurity investments," Constellation Research's Mehta said.
• And expect every other company in cloud security — including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Crowdstrike, among others — to make a bid for Wiz customers running on AWS or Azure.

We're playing for Ultras

A few things have changed since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage last year at the company's GTC conference in San Jose to reveal new details about its Blackwell GPUs, which began shipping earlier this year to customers. The generative AI frenzy settled down as companies struggled to get apps into production, OpenAI's road map slowed, and DeepSeek showed how state-of-the-art models could be produced with far less compute than assumed.

That's not to say that enthusiasm for Nvidia's chips has diminished, for sure, and Huang's appearance Tuesday at the SAP Center attracted nearly 25,000 attendees according to CNBC. The company introduced Blackwell Ultra, its next-generation GPU expected to ship later this year, and Vera Rubin, a new combination CPU/GPU that includes the first custom CPU designed entirely by the company.

Nvidia also introduced Dynamo, which is open-source inference software that can orchestrate AI workloads across hundreds of GPUs. Wall Street found this year's GTC uninspiring, according to Bloomberg, but a less-frothy GPU market might be good for everyone — other than Nvidia, anyway.

Enterprise funding

Nerdio raised $500 million in Series C funding for its virtual desktop service, which works with Microsoft's Azure Virtual Desktop and Microsoft 365 products.

Supabase landed $80 million in Series B funding to expand the market for a managed version of its namesake open-source project, which is an alternative to Google's Firebase database service.

Omni scored $69 million in Series B funding as it builds out its data analytics platform for business intelligence users.

Graphite raised $52 million in Series B funding for its take on an AI coding review tool, which helps customers verify code generated by AI code editors like Cursor and Windsurf.

Gradial landed $13 million in Series A funding to help marketing departments build AI agents that will churn out copy.

Arcade raised $12 million in Series A funding for its agent integration platform, which makes it easier to connect agents to sources of corporate data.

The Runtime roundup

Rippling sued Deel for corporate espionage, alleging that its HR software rival planted a mole among its employees to steal sensitive data.

Meanwhile, Celonis sued SAP, claiming that SAP engaged in anticompetitive behavior by making it too hard for Celonis users to get access to their SAP data.

Netflix is starting to use its homegrown content-delivery network to serve video games to customers, according to Fast Company, introducing another headache into the CDN provider market.

Anthropic is getting ready to introduce new enterprise features aimed at "knowledge work," according to The Financial Times.

Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!