Its $33B acquisition of cloud security startup Wiz is 2.4x larger than its second-largest purchase (Motorola Mobility in 2012).
The deal also marks the largest cybersecurity exit in history, surpassing Splunk’s $28B sale to Cisco.
Google’s M&A strategy has evolved from adtech (YouTube, DoubleClick) to mobile (Nest, Motorola) to cloud (Mandiant, Looker). The Wiz deal cements its shift toward cloud security as it battles Microsoft and AWS.
All told, Google has spent nearly $66B on its top 10 acquisitions — with half of that going to Wiz.
As the VC market prioritizes early-stage bets, it’s getting harder for late-stage companies to raise at billion-dollar valuations.
Instead, early- and mid-stage players are dominating new unicorn births.
Since 2023, 68% of new unicorns reached billion-dollar valuations at Series C or earlier — up from 48% between 2013 and 2022.
Three forces are driving bigger bets, sooner:
AI hype is pulling valuations forward. Nearly half of 2024’s new unicorns were AI startups, with 74% of AI deals happening early-stage.
FOMO is driving early-stage bidding wars. Investors are locking in category leaders early, bypassing traditional growth rounds in a tighter funding market.
More dry powder, fewer deals. With 2024 venture dealmaking at an 8-year low, capital is flowing into earlier-stage bets.
The result is a 2-speed market where top startups are fast-tracking to unicorn status, while late-stage companies face a tougher road to high valuations.
Clinical trials cost $55M on average and can take more than a decade to complete.
Even so, over 90% of drugs fail at the clinical stage.
Pharma and tech giants are betting on AI to de-risk the clinical development pipeline, from improving protocol design to analyzing larger and more complex datasets than ever before.
One standout application is patient recruitment, where AI can perform the initial screening process and match patients to clinical trials via EHR analysis.
Four of the 10 largest deals in AI clinical development since 2023 went to patient recruitment platforms, and just this week, Tempus acquired Deep 6 AI, citing the latter’s coverage of 30M+ patients.
P.S. This week’s newsletter features insights from CB Insights' new Head of Insights, Jason Saltzman. Follow him on LinkedIn for more analysis and the latest CB Insights data — plus plenty of pretty charts.
