Google is Buying Mandiant
Mandiant, a cybersecurity company that’s popular for its cyber incident response is now being taken over by Google for a whopping $5.4 billion deal. On Tuesday, Google revealed this in a statement it’ll buy out Mandiant in an all-cash deal, at $23 a share. Mandiant has started its operations two decades ago, by a former U.S. Air Force officer named Kevin Mandia. Gradually, it grew to be one of the prominent cybersecurity companies that are reached out by tech companies and cyber-attacked firms, for incident response services. And in 2013, FireEye Inc. bought the company and sold it to a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group last year, for $1.2 billion. And a year after working alone, Microsoft earlier this year attempted buying Mandiant but dropped talks as it saw that it wasn’t a good enough strategic fit, according to a person familiar with the matter. Shares of Mandiant rose sharply after the news of Microsoft’s interest and slipped down once the deal was dropped. Now, with Google’s confirmation, Mandiant’s shares over 6% on Monday trading hours, putting the overall company’s valuation at over $5.6 billion. Google said Mandiant will be part of its Cloud business after its complete acquisition, aiding its cloud business clients in terms of security. The deal is yet to be approved by regulators, this may take a few months. Google’s takeover of Mandiant is its second-largest deal of all time, with the first one being Motorola’s acquisition in 2012 for $12.5 billion.
