In 2025, the cybersecurity industry was reorganized by acquisition. Roughly $96 billion of mergers and acquisitions changed the shape of the sector in a single year, the average deal grew by more than 80 percent to about $2.5 billion, and the largest cybersecurity transaction in history, Google’s $32 billion purchase of Wiz, was agreed and cleared.1,2 The story of the year is not that more deals happened. It is what the deals were for: a small number of platforms buying their way to completeness, and a long tail of independent vendors discovering that their category had a closing window.
The 2025 deal wave was not a cyclical uptick. It was the visible surface of a structural shift in how enterprises buy security and, therefore, in how security companies are built and sold.
The transactions below define the cycle. Read together, they show platforms buying across every major category, identity, cloud, observability, threat intelligence, and the new frontier of AI security, in a coordinated push toward completeness.
Three transactions, more than any others, show the strategy at work: a cloud-security purchase, an identity purchase, and an analytics purchase, each a platform buying its way to completeness in a category it could not afford to lack.
Every large transaction in the ledger serves one strategy. To understand the premiums, and to predict where they will appear next, a founder has to understand what the platforms are actually building and why it forces a choice on everyone else.
Two very different kinds of buyer drive the cycle, and they value a company differently. Knowing which one a business is built for shapes how, and to whom, it should be sold.
Windsor Drake’s research desk compiled this report from transaction data, public filings, and the firm’s sell-side advisory work in software, fintech, AI, and cybersecurity. It is intended to inform founders, owners, and acquirers evaluating a transaction, and does not constitute investment advice.
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How platformization reshapes who buys, who sells, and when. In 2025, the cybersecurity industry was reorganized by acquisition.
The report draws on 2025 deal activity across the software, fintech, AI, and cybersecurity markets, with Windsor Drake’s outlook for 2026.
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