On May 11, 2021, Cisco announced it was buying Sedona Systems, a 43-person Tel Aviv network-intelligence startup, for a reported $100 million. Globes called it Cisco’s 15th acquisition in Israel. The Times of Israel, quoting Cisco Israel’s own managing director about the very same deal, called it the 16th. Same company, same week, same announcement — and the buyer’s own spokesperson couldn’t confirm which number acquisition he was closing.

That’s not a rounding error. It’s the normal condition of this beat. Ask five sources how many Israeli companies Microsoft, Google or Cisco has bought and you’ll get five different numbers, because nobody — not IVC, not Crunchbase, not the acquirers’ own press offices — publishes a reconciled, sourced count. So we built one.

We went company by company: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, IBM, PayPal, eBay, Oracle, SAP, Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA and more, cross-checking press releases, SEC filings, Crunchbase, Tracxn and CB Insights against Israeli and international trade press. Roughly 30 multinational acquirers turned up at least one confirmed Israeli-founded purchase. Thirteen cleared a three-deal floor. What we didn’t expect going in: the company that buys the most Israeli startups and the company that spends the most money on them are almost never the same company.

The Screen

A deal counted only if:

1. The target was founded in Israel, or founded by Israeli nationals with its operational base in Israel at the time of sale — not a US company that merely opened an Israel R&D office after the deal closed.
2. The acquisition closed. Reported talks, letters of intent and rumored deals don’t count.
3. At least one dated, independently verifiable source confirms it — a press release, an SEC filing, or two contemporaneous outlets.
4. Whole-company acquisitions only — not funding rounds, minority stakes, or licensing deals.
5. All-time, bounded by how far back good sourcing survives. Most named deals here run from 2000 to 2026; a few go back further but got dropped for thin sourcing.

We also excluded a handful of companies that get miscounted as Israeli in generic round-ups — more on that below — and we didn’t try to force-reconcile every acquirer’s own self-reported running total against ours. Where the two disagree, we say so rather than pick a winner.

Answer First: The 13

Tier 1: The Volume Buyers

1. Microsoft — 17 deals, and it isn’t close

Microsoft’s Israeli buying spree opens in 2000 with WebAppoint and, as far as we can verify, last moved in 2022 with Oribi, a web-analytics firm. In between: Whale Communications, Gteko, 3DV Systems, Aorato, Adallom, Secure Islands, Equivio, N-trig, Hexadite, Cloudyn, CyberX, Peer5 — a deal most years for two decades. Most prices were never disclosed; the ones that were (Aorato ~$200M, Adallom ~$320–340M, CyberX ~$165M) suggest a house style of paying for capability rather than headlines. The most consequential name on the list isn’t the biggest check: Adallom’s four founders sold to Microsoft for a reported $320–340M in 2015, then left to found Wiz — which Google bought for $32B a decade later. Microsoft financed the team that eventually built the biggest exit in Israeli history, for someone else.

2. Cisco — 13 named, and the company’s own count keeps moving

Cisco’s Israeli run starts with HyNEX in 2000 and includes NDS Group (~$5B, 2012, split with Permira), Intucell ($475M, 2013), Leaba Semiconductor, Portshift, Sedona Systems, Epsagon, Lightspin and Robust Intelligence ($400M, 2024) — 13 deals we can independently name and date. Cisco’s own spokespeople have claimed higher: “15th” and “16th” for that same 2021 Sedona deal, in the same week, from the same company. One purchase routinely credited to Cisco’s Israeli tally, identity-security startup Oort (2023), was actually founded in Boston — the mix-up likely comes from confusing it with Ermetic, the Tel Aviv-founded identity-security firm Tenable bought that same year.

3. Palo Alto Networks — 12 deals, one of which is 89% of the money

Palo Alto Networks has bought an Israeli cybersecurity company almost every year since 2014: Cyvera, LightCyber, Secdo, Demisto, Twistlock, PureSec, Bridgecrew, Cider Security, Talon Cyber Security, Dig Security and Koi — eleven tuck-ins ranging from $47M to $625M, mostly folded straight into Cortex XDR or Prisma Cloud within a product cycle or two. Then, in 2026, CyberArk: roughly $25B in cash and stock, Palo Alto’s largest acquisition ever, at a 26% premium to CyberArk’s trading price ahead of the announcement. That single deal is worth several times more than the other eleven combined.

Tier 2: The Steady Buyers

4. Google — 9 named, one of which rewrote the record book

Waze ($1.1B, 2013) made Google’s Israeli reputation; a decade of smaller cloud and cybersecurity tuck-ins — SlickLogin, Orbitera, Velostrata, Alooma, Elastifile, BreezoMeter, Siemplify — kept it quiet but steady. Then Wiz: first offered $23B in July 2024 and rejected, returned with a $32B all-cash offer announced in March 2025, closed March 11, 2026, with a $3.2B breakup fee keeping both sides honest through a year of regulatory review. It’s the largest Israeli tech acquisition ever. A 2019 report from IVC, GKH Law and IATI separately counted Google at 10 acquisitions for 2014–2019 alone — “four of them acquihires” small enough to have left no public paper trail, meaning our named count of nine is almost certainly a floor, not a ceiling.

5. Apple — 7 deals, mostly cameras, one outlier

Apple’s Israeli shopping list reads like a parts bin for the iPhone camera and Face ID: Anobit (flash-memory chips, ~$400M, 2012), PrimeSense (depth-sensing, ~$345–360M, 2013), LinX, RealFace and Camerai. Then, in January 2026, Apple reportedly paid roughly $2B for Q.ai, a stealth AI startup that had raised only about $24.5M in prior funding — Apple’s largest Israeli deal by a wide margin, and its most opaque.

6. Meta — 6 deals, and it’s been quiet since 2019

Snaptu, Face.com, Onavo, Pebbles Interfaces, Redkix and Servicefriend — six deals between 2011 and 2019, none over $200M, most of them acquihires that fed WhatsApp, Oculus or Workplace. Onavo is the one worth remembering: a data-analytics and VPN app Facebook partly used for competitive intelligence on rival apps, pulled from the App Store in 2018 over privacy violations and shut down entirely in 2019. As far as we can verify, Meta hasn’t bought an Israeli company since.

Tier 3: The Selective Buyers

7. IBM — 4 deals, one of which built an entire cyber lab

XIV (enterprise storage, $300–350M, 2008), Trusteer (fraud and endpoint security, reported anywhere from $630M to $1B, 2013), EZSource, and Databand.ai ($150M, 2022). Trusteer seeded IBM’s Israel cybersecurity lab; its founders, Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar, left afterward to build Transmit Security.

8. Broadcom — 4 deals, all mid-sized chip tuck-ins

VisionTech (2001), Dune Networks ($178–185M, 2009), Percello ($86M plus earnout, 2011), and BroadLight (~$195–200M, 2012) — none individually huge, all folded into Broadcom’s networking-silicon business.

9. Qualcomm — 4 deals, two with genuinely disputed prices

iSkoot (2010, reported anywhere from $32M to $100M), DesignArt Networks (2012, reported at both roughly $24M and roughly $150M depending on the outlet), EPOS, and Wilocity (~$300M, 2014). We couldn’t reconcile either spread and aren’t picking a winner.

10. Intel — 3 headline deals, the highest average price on this list

Mobileye ($15.3B, 2017, an SEC-filed figure), Habana Labs ($2B, 2019), and Moovit (~$900–915M, 2020, per Intel’s own 10-Q). Three deals, roughly $18.2B combined — more than Cisco’s entire 26-year Israeli history. The two big ones had opposite endings: Habana lost most of its founding team and engineers within five years and was effectively folded into Intel’s broader AI effort rather than competing head-on with NVIDIA, while Mobileye was spun back out via a Nasdaq IPO in October 2022.

11. NVIDIA — 3 deals, one now worth tens of billions a year

Mellanox ($6.9B, 2020, after NVIDIA outbid Intel for it), Deci (~$300M, 2024), and Run:ai (reported at both roughly $700M and $800M, completed December 2024 after DOJ clearance). Mellanox alone now anchors an NVIDIA networking business reportedly generating over $31B annually — more than four times what NVIDIA paid for the whole company.

12. eBay — 3 deals, the oldest era on this list

Shopping.com ($620M, 2005), The Gifts Project ($20–30M, 2011), and SalesPredict ($20–40M, 2016). Kira Radinsky, SalesPredict’s co-founder, stayed on as eBay Israel’s chief scientist after the deal.

13. PayPal — 3 deals, starting with a 12x return

Fraud Sciences ($169M, 2008, a roughly 12x return for its venture investors per contemporaneous coverage) became the backbone of PayPal’s fraud-detection engine. CyActive (reported at $43M per PayPal’s own 10-Q, and roughly $60M per contemporaneous press, 2015) and Curv (~$200M reported, 2021) followed.

The Scoreboard Nobody Prints

Rank the same 13 companies by combined dollars instead of deal count, and the list barely resembles itself.

Microsoft, the most prolific buyer on this list by a wide margin, ranks eighth on money spent. Intel, with only three named acquisitions, ranks third. NVIDIA, with three deals, outspends eBay, Broadcom, Qualcomm, PayPal and Meta combined. The pattern holds across almost every row: volume and value are two different games, and only Palo Alto Networks plays both at a high level simultaneously.

The reason is structural, not strategic. Ten of these thirteen acquirers built their Israeli position through steady, mid-size tuck-ins — the kind that gets folded into an existing product line within a fiscal quarter. Three built it through a single outlier deal each: Intel’s Mobileye, NVIDIA’s Mellanox, and, within twelve months of each other, Google’s Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ CyberArk — which between them account for more than half of all the money on this entire scoreboard, by our own arithmetic on the combined-value column above.

The Ones That Didn’t Make It

Below the three-deal floor, but worth knowing about. Amazon has made exactly two confirmed Israeli acquisitions — Annapurna Labs ($350M, 2015) and CloudEndure ($200M, 2019) — and Annapurna alone may be the best per-dollar return of any deal in this entire piece: it became the foundation of five generations of the AWS Nitro System, three generations of Graviton processors, and the Trainium and Inferentia AI chips. Oracle (Ravello Systems, Crosswise — 2 deals), SAP (Gigya, WalkMe — 2 deals) and Salesforce (Datorama — 1 deal) all show the same pattern: a company that clearly liked what it bought but hasn’t yet made it a habit.

Frequently mislabeled as Israeli. Movidius, bought by Intel in 2016, was founded in Dublin. Pensando, bought by AMD in 2022 for roughly $1.9B, was founded in Silicon Valley by an Indian-American former Cisco team. Both show up as “Israeli” in generic tech-acquisition round-ups; neither belongs there, and neither company’s Israeli count in this piece includes them.

A near-duplicate that looks like a copy-paste error. At least two aggregator-style sites list Google acquiring two separate companies — “Simplicity” and Siemplify — for $500M each in 2022. We found no evidence a company called Simplicity was ever acquired by Google. It reads like a duplicated Siemplify entry that picked up a typo and got copied between near-identical articles.

How To Actually Use This

Match your category to the buyer’s actual pattern, not its reputation. Palo Alto Networks has bought eleven cybersecurity tuck-ins in a row — if you’re a security product with clean product-market fit and a mid-size team, you’re the exact shape of company it knows how to integrate. Meta hasn’t bought an Israeli company since 2019; don’t build a pitch deck around it.

If you want the outlier number, there are only three realistic buyers. Google, Palo Alto Networks and Intel are the only acquirers here that have ever paid a double-digit-billion price for an Israeli company. Everyone else on this list pays in the tens or low hundreds of millions, consistently, year after year.

Ask what happens to the product, not just the price. Mellanox became the backbone of an NVIDIA business now generating more per year than NVIDIA paid for the whole company. Habana Labs, bought at a comparable multiple of its size, had largely lost its founding team within five years. Check size doesn’t predict the outcome — look at how the acquirer has treated its last three purchases in your category before you take the offer.

Don’t repeat a number you haven’t checked. Cisco’s own spokespeople couldn’t agree on Cisco’s own count, in the same week, about the same deal. If a specific “Nth Israeli acquisition” claim matters to your pitch or your reporting, trace it to a press release or a filing — not to a listicle that traces to another listicle.

Watch the quiet ones. A company with exactly two Israeli deals and one of them a home run — Amazon, arguably SAP — is a company one good pitch away from turning a pattern into a habit.

Fast facts: Israeli tech acquisitions by company

Which company has bought the most Israeli tech companies? Microsoft, with 17 named acquisitions since 2000 — though Cisco’s own press statements claim a higher, less independently verifiable count.

What’s the largest acquisition of an Israeli tech company ever? Google’s $32B purchase of cloud-security company Wiz, closed March 11, 2026.

Does the biggest buyer by count also spend the most money? No. Microsoft ranks eighth by combined disclosed and reported value; Google, Palo Alto Networks and Intel rank first through third on the strength of one outlier deal each.

How many Israeli companies has Apple acquired? At least seven since 2011, plus a reported ~$2B purchase of stealth AI startup Q.ai in January 2026.

What’s the best per-dollar Israeli acquisition nobody talks about? Amazon’s ~$350M purchase of Annapurna Labs in 2015, which seeded the AWS Nitro System, Graviton, Trainium and Inferentia chip lines — despite Amazon having made only two Israeli acquisitions total.

Notes on the numbers

1. Cisco’s own count doesn’t agree with itself. Globes called Sedona Systems (May 2021) Cisco’s “15th” Israeli acquisition; the Times of Israel, quoting Cisco Israel’s own managing director on the same deal, called it the “16th.” We used our own named, dated count (13) rather than either running total.
2. Oort is not Israeli. Cisco’s 2023 identity-security purchase was founded in Boston by Matt Caulfield; at least one widely shared list mislabels it Israeli, likely confusing it with Ermetic, the Tel Aviv-founded identity-security startup Tenable bought that same year.
3. Movidius (Intel, 2016) and Pensando (AMD, 2022) are commonly miscounted as Israeli. Movidius was founded in Dublin; Pensando was founded in Silicon Valley by an Indian-American former Cisco team. Neither appears in our counts.
4. A likely duplicate entry is circulating. At least two aggregator sites credit Google with acquiring both “Simplicity” and Siemplify for $500M each in 2022. We found no independent evidence “Simplicity” exists as a separate deal.
5. Several individual prices are genuinely disputed, not just imprecisely reported. Alooma is cited at both $100M and $150M; DesignArt Networks at both roughly $24M and roughly $150M; iSkoot between $32M and $100M; Trusteer between $630M and $1B; Run:ai at both roughly $700M and $800M. We used the more commonly cited figure in each case and flagged the spread rather than pretending precision.
6. “Combined value” mixes hard numbers with estimates. Mobileye, Moovit, Mellanox, CyberArk and Wiz are SEC-filed or officially disclosed figures. Most of Microsoft’s, Meta’s and Qualcomm’s totals rest on press-reported estimates for deals neither party ever confirmed a price on — meaning acquirers with more undisclosed deals are almost certainly undercounted in the dollar column, not overcounted.
7. A 2019 IVC/GKH/IATI report puts Google at 10 acquisitions and Microsoft at 8 for the 2014–2019 window alone — both higher than what we could independently name for that specific period, pointing to acquihires small enough to have left no public trail.
8. Pre-2010 deals rest on thinner sourcing across the board. We included only names independently confirmed by at least one contemporaneous source; several older, smaller Intel and Cisco Israeli purchases likely exist that we couldn’t verify well enough to date and price with confidence.
9. Screening is ours and it’s thorough, not exhaustive. Roughly 30 candidate acquirers checked against SEC filings, Crunchbase, Tracxn, CB Insights, Reuters, TechCrunch, Calcalist/CTech, Globes and the Times of Israel. Data current to 10 September 2026.

Screened roughly 30. Thirteen cleared a three-deal floor. Data current to 10 September 2026. If we got something wrong, tell us and we’ll correct it in public. 💜

Previously in this series: Tel Aviv micro VCs · Israeli defense tech funds · The Passport Funds: New York · The Passport Funds: West Coast · The Personal Check: Israeli angels · The On-Ramps: accelerators and incubators