Google acquired Israeli cybersecurity startup Siempl for $500 million

Google is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity startup Siemplify. The acquisition, which is estimated at $500 million, will mark the tech giant's first acquisition of an Israeli company active in cybersecurity. Siemplify, which has 200 employees in Israel, the United States and London, will join Google after the acquisition.

Google will use Siemplify to lay the groundwork for its cybersecurity business in Israel, which will be part of the company's cloud computing activities, and Siemplify's co-founders will remain with the company.

Google CEO Sandal Pichai promised U.S. President Joe Biden in August 2021 that the company would invest $10 billion in cybersecurity over the next five years. Google's plans include expanding Zero Trust programs to help secure the software supply chain, as well as strengthening open source security. The company has pledged to train 100,000 Americans in areas such as IT support and data analytics to learn much-needed skills, including data privacy and security. The promise will include making acquisitions and investments, and Siemplify will be Google's first such acquisition, which last year had already invested $50 million in another Israeli cybersecurity firm, Cybereason.

Siemplify has raised $58 million in four funding rounds to date, with Israeli venture capital firm G20 Ventures being the company's largest shareholder. Other investors include 83North, Jump Capital and Georgian, which also recently invested in Israeli cybersecurity startup Noame Security.

Siemplify was founded in 2015 by Amos Stern (CEO), Alon Cohen (CTO), and Garry Fatakhov (COO). Stern served in the IDF's intelligence unit, where he headed a cyber unit before moving on to work for Erbit Systems, where he met his co-founder.

Siemplify's Secure Operations Platform is designed as the "operating system" of soC (Secure Operations Center). Unlike other SOAR (Security Coordination, Automation, and Response) platforms, Siemplify is designed to manage the entire security operations function from start to finish, with a primary focus on building and automating the rules of the game. The company's platform will be integrated into Google's cloud system.

Siemplify's dynamic modeling approach to handling alerts greatly reduces the number of cases that the SOC team has to handle and adds important context that can be missed. Analysts can prioritize threats that may be overlooked, allowing them to conduct a unified investigation of alerts that may come from different security sensors but belong to the same threat.

Google's biggest acquisition in Israel to date was the $1.1 billion acquisition of Waze in 2016. In 2019, Google Cloud acquired Israeli company Elastifile for $200 million and Aluma for $100 million.