This is a rare achievement for the Raanana-based company’s founders – Uri Levine, Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinar – and CEO Noam Bardin, who within five years turned Waze into one of the most popular mapping applications in the world, which serves some 50 million users on a daily basis.

Waze achieved all the demands it presented to Google in the negotiations: Waze’s activity will remain in Israel for years, Google cannot fire a single employee out of Waze’s 107 workers, and the entire acquisition sum – about $1 billion – will go into the pockets of the investors, founders and employees in cash, without stocks whose value would change unexpectedly.

Google will complete the acquisition within about a month in a bid to integrate Waze into the Android 5.0 operating system, expected to be launched this year.

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