Google acquires Israel-based cybersecurity startup Siemplify for $0.5 billion to become part of Google Cloud’s Chronicle

With cybersecurity breaches at a record high, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced last August 2021 the tech giant will invest $10 billion in cybersecurity over the next five years. As part of the multi-billion investment, Google announced yesterday it has acquired Israeli cybersecurity startup Siemplify to shore up its enterprise cybersecurity unit called Chronicle.

Although Google and Siemplify‘s CEO and co-founder Amos Stern have both confirmed the acquisition, neither company disclosed the acquisition cost. However, a report from the Israeli tech news outlet Calcalist, estimated the price tag to be around $0.5 billion.

Google Cloud’s Chronicle is one of Google’s original moonshots founded as an enterprise security company within its “X” program. It was later migrated to Google Cloud in 2019 as part of Google’s efforts to expand its enterprise revenues and take on the two market leaders: Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.

As part of the acquisition agreement, Siemplify’s co-founders will continue at the company and Google will use Siemplify to serve as the foundation for its cybersecurity operations in Israel which will be part of the corporation’s cloud activity.

Founded in 2015 by CEO Amos Stern, Alon Cohen (CTO), and Garry Fatakhov (COO), Siemplify is a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) provider that is redefining security operations for enterprises and MSSPs worldwide. Its holistic security operations platform is a simple, centralized workbench that enables security teams to better investigate, analyze, and remediate threats. Before founding Siemplify, Stern had previously served in the IDF’s Intelligence Corps where he was the head of a cyber unit. He later moved on to work for Elbit Systems, where he met his co-founders.

In a blog post, Stern wrote: “This marks an important milestone in the Siemplify journey. When co-founders Alon Cohen and Garry Fatakhov and I started Siemplify in 2015, we all knew, from our experience building and training security operations centers from around the world, that security operations was a function in dire need of innovation.”

Stern continues: “Naturally, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) as a category did not yet exist, and as is often the case with startups, we had to keep innovating, working with customers and listening to the market in order to build a security operations platform that truly improves the way security teams respond to cyberthreats.”

Before the acquisition, Siemplify has raised a total of $58M in funding over 6 rounds since its inception six years ago. Its latest funding was raised on May 20, 2019.