Alphabet

Person lying on a bed while holding a phone
By  Jessica Hagen 12:24 pm November 14, 2022
San Diego-based connected sleep device maker ResMed and Alphabet's life science offshoot Verily announced the formation of Primasun, an end-to-end solution to help employers and healthcare providers identify populations at risk for complex sleep disorders. Formed as a joint venture, Primasun will initially evaluate patients with insomnia, provide guidance to improve sleep hygiene and connect...
A phone showing a screenshot from Project Baseline's COVID-19 testing program.
By  Emily Olsen 12:27 pm September 12, 2022
Alphabet's life science offshoot Verily announced it had raised $1 billion in an investment round led by its parent company alongside a shakeup of its executive team. The company's founder Andy Conrad will step down as CEO, moving to an executive chairman position on Verily's board. Current president Stephen Gillett will take the reins in the chief executive role, effective January 2023. Gillett...
Jessica Mega, Verily's chief medical & scientific officer and co-founder
By  Emily Olsen 11:54 am September 24, 2021
Alphabet’s life science subsidiary Verily is working to detach itself from Google’s technology and possibly move outside its parent company, according to reporting by Insider.  The plan, internally called Flywheel, launched early this year to remove Verily’s products from Google’s computing infrastructure, as in moving the business unit from Google’s internal cloud service to a public version...
The law
By  Laura Lovett 12:52 pm June 16, 2021
The FDA has rejected Verily's Parkinson's disease-focused clinical trial tool designed to evaluate the effectiveness of certain interventions, on the premise that it has limited ability to capture the full picture of a patient's capacities. The tool, dubbed the Virtual Motor Exam for Parkinson's disease, runs on the FDA-cleared Verily Study Watch and was designed to digitally assess a patient's...
Piggy bank health
By  Laura Lovett 03:19 pm March 18, 2021
Kidney care company Strive Health landed $140 million in a Series B funding led by Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG, bringing its total funding to $223.5 million. The deal is expected to give the company “unique access” to Google and Alphabet assets. Redpoint, NEA, Town Hall Ventures, Ascension Ventures and Echo Ventures also participated in the round. WHAT IT DOES The company’s platform is able...
Screen examples of the features on three smartphones
By  Dave Muoio 11:00 am February 4, 2021
Google Health has announced a new wellness feature coming to its Google Fit mobile app that uses machine learning to give users heart rate and respiratory rate readings without the need for any hardware other than their smartphone's camera. The two tools are slated to launch for all Pixel devices in the next month, and will come to additional Android devices running version 6 within the months to...
By  Dave Muoio 11:28 am January 14, 2021
Fourteen-and-a-half months later, Google has finally completed its acquisition of health wearables company Fitbit. The news was announced this morning in complementary statements from Fitbit cofounder and (now previous) CEO James Park and Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of devices and services. "This is just the beginning because becoming part of the Google family means we can do even more to inspire...
By  MobiHealthNews 10:15 am December 22, 2020
Considering the size and scope of Alphabet, it should be little surprise that the company and its subsidiaries (Google, Google Cloud and Verily, to name a few) have become deeply ingrained in the healthcare ecosystem over the last several years. The tech giant maintained the momentum in 2020 with efforts focused on artificial intelligence, data flow and digital clinical research – and also sought...
The round had participation from existing investors including Alphabet, Silver Lake, Temasek, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and others.
By  Mallory Hackett 11:28 am December 18, 2020
Alphabet’s life sciences and healthcare subsidiary Verily has raised $700 million in an investment round funded by its existing investors, including Alphabet, Silver Lake, Temasek, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and others. WHAT IT DOES Verily serves as Alphabet’s research arm that develops tools and devices to collect, organize and activate health data. It also creates interventions to prevent...
By  Dave Muoio 12:29 pm December 17, 2020
Following months of regulatory investigation, the European Commission has officially signed off on Google's $2.1 billion purchase of health-wearable-maker Fitbit. Still, the go-ahead is contingent on a handful of commitments from the tech company that focus on its competitive practices across advertising, digital health APIs and smart device interoperability. "We can approve the proposed...