Google acquires Israeli cybersecurity company in $500 million deal

The choice to acquire an Israeli company will likely not go unnoticed by Google’s employees, some of whom have vocally and vehemently opposed partnerships with the Jewish State in the past.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Google’s parent company Alphabet announced Tuesday that it acquired Israeli cybersecurity company Siemplify, with insiders telling Israel Hayom that the tech industry titan had paid some $500 million in cash for the buy.

The deal marked the first time that Google has obtained an Israeli cybersecurity company, and comes on the heels of a pledge by the company to President Joe Biden to invest at least $10 billion in cybersecurity over the next five years.

In a statement, Google said that Siemplify’s solution would be integrated into its current cloud offerings.

Founded in 2015, Siemplify has already raised some $58 million in various funding rounds, and provides built-in security solutions specifically focused for cloud servers and cloud-based companies.

The choice to acquire an Israeli company will likely not go unnoticed by Google’s employees, some of whom have vocally and vehemently opposed partnerships with the Jewish State in the past.

In October 2021, a number of employees at tech industry titans Google and Amazon signed an open letter published in left-wing UK daily The Guardian, calling upon the corporations to renege on a deal which would see the organizations’ technology used in a massive project for the Israeli government.

The employees said the $1.4 billion deal to help migrate the majority of the Israeli government and military’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers was an agreement “to sell dangerous technology to the Israeli military and government.”

They said they could not “look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”

In June 2021, Google’s head of diversity was reassigned, but not fired, after the discovery of an antisemitic blog post he wrote, in which he said Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war and killing.