Aniket Pujari(Bloomberg) — Wiz backer Sequoia Capital is poised to deliver a return of about 25 times its invested capital from the cybersecurity startup’s pending sale to Google parent Alphabet Inc., according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The multiple on invested capital, known as MOIC, is calculated based on Sequoia’s roughly 10% stake in Wiz, which Alphabet agreed to buy for $32 billion in cash. Sequoia is set to reap about $3 billion from the sale, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Another Wiz backer, Greenoaks Capital Partners, is poised to secure about $2 billion from the transaction, according to a separate person familiar with the matter. Greenoaks invested roughly $300 million in Wiz, and based on that math, the firm’s MOIC from its bet is 6.67.
Representatives for Sequoia, Greenoaks and Wiz declined to comment.
Wiz will join the Google Cloud business after completion of the deal, which would be Alphabet’s largest to date. Wiz’s platform aims to prevent cybersecurity breaches in the cloud.
“Wiz and Google Cloud share a vision to improve security by making it easier and faster for organizations of all types and sizes to protect themselves, end-to-end, across all major clouds,” Sequoia partner Doug Leone wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “This will help spur the adoption of multicloud cybersecurity.”
Sequoia and Israeli venture capital firm Cyberstarts led a $20 million seed round for Wiz and participated in other funding rounds, including a so-called Series A with Index Ventures and Insight Partners.
“The team quickly hit on the insight that cloud security needed a simpler, agentless architecture for an increasingly complex digital world,” Leone wrote Tuesday.
–With assistance from Andrew Martin.
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