When a consortium collapses at the finish line, most deals die with it. Assaf Rappaport and Avi Costica — two of the co-founders behind Wiz, the cloud security company acquired by Google for $32 billion earlier this year — are refusing to let that happen. According to a Calcalist report, the pair will now personally finance their bid to acquire Israeli commercial broadcaster Reshet 13 after the other investors originally part of their group pulled out of the deal. It is a striking pivot: a pair of cybersecurity billionaires stepping up, alone, to bankroll a major media acquisition in a market most tech founders wouldn’t touch.
The development is the latest turn in what has been a drawn-out and complicated process to determine the future of Reshet 13, one of Israel’s most-watched television networks. Rappaport and Costica had initially assembled a broader investor group to share the financial load, but those backers have since withdrawn, leaving the two founders to either walk away or write the checks themselves. They chose the latter. For context on how Israeli capital and ambition increasingly intersect across sectors, Future Wire has been tracking the broader pattern of Israeli capital markets and where the country’s biggest fortunes are being deployed next.
Why Two Cloud Security Billionaires Want a TV Network
The instinct to buy a broadcaster might seem out of left field for founders whose defining achievement is a cloud security platform, but the logic becomes clearer in the Israeli context. Reshet 13 is not just a content vehicle — it is one of the most politically and culturally influential media institutions in the country. Ownership of a major free-to-air broadcaster carries significant soft power, and that kind of influence is a different asset class from enterprise SaaS equity.
Rappaport, who served as Wiz’s CEO through the Google acquisition process, and Costica, another key figure in the company’s founding team, are both sitting on generational wealth following that $32 billion exit. That financial position makes a solo media acquisition logistically feasible in a way it simply would not be for most. The question is not whether they can afford to close the deal — it is whether regulators and the broadcaster’s existing stakeholders will allow a transaction of this shape to proceed without the broader institutional backing that a consortium would have provided.
A Deal That Still Has to Clear Major Hurdles
Israeli broadcasting acquisitions involve regulatory review, and a transaction backed by only two individual buyers — however wealthy — is a different proposition than one spread across a diversified investor group. Regulators will scrutinize the concentration of ownership and editorial independence questions that come with any change of control at a major news broadcaster. The withdrawal of partner investors does not just change the financing structure; it changes the risk profile of the deal and potentially its reception by the authorities who must approve it.
There is also the question of what Rappaport and Costica actually intend to do with Reshet 13 if the deal closes. Media acquisitions by tech founders have a mixed record globally, and Israel’s domestic advertising market — the primary revenue engine for free-to-air television — faces the same structural pressures from streaming and social platforms that have battered broadcasters everywhere. Whether the founders see this as a long-term media play, a strategic influence investment, or something else entirely has not been publicly detailed. What is clear, per the Calcalist report, is that they are not walking away. In a deal environment where consortium investors blinked, the Wiz founders are doubling down alone.
