Google (Alphabet) has acquired about 256 companies in its lifetime, including YouTube, Waze, Fitbit, DoubleClick, and Mandiant. These acquisitions are used to eliminate competition, increase the number of products and services that Google can market to consumers, and improve on or expand existing Google products. Some recent Google acquisitions have set the stage for the company’s journey into artificial intelligence, robotics, cybersecurity, and more. Google has announced that it will be folding itself into a larger company, called Alphabet.

The company was formed by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with the aim being to separate the brand’s other companies and ventures from the Google name and make Google “cleaner and more accountable”. GV, originally Google Ventures, is the branch of Alphabet that invests in start-ups at the early stages. If you’re interested in the cutting edge of tech, keep an eye on GV’s investments.

What is Alphabet company known for?

1. CapitalG and GV invest in other companies, but since those are usually small stakes below 50%, these companies are not part of Alphabet Group.
2. Google’s $23 per share offer was a 45% premium to the price shares traded for on Feb. 1, 2022 (prior to the Microsoft news).
3. This translated to a total revenue of US$110,855 million in 2017 and a net income of US$12,662 million.
4. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns several businesses that contribute to its overall success.
5. These include businesses in the fields of advertising, healthy technology, video, security, and navigation.
6. The company has diversified far beyond search engines in the past two decades.

AdMob started as a platform that enabled mobile app developers to monetize their apps with advertisements. On January 16, 2020, Alphabet became the fourth US company to reach a $1 trillion market value64 entering the trillion dollar companies club for the first time. Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and the video-sharing service remains under Alphabet’s Google division. The company’s knack for making calculated bets has reshaped the tech landscape, setting new standards for what’s possible. From transforming the way we access information and connect with each other to pioneering advancements in AI and digital advertising, Alphabet continues to push the boundaries, turning ambitious visions into tangible realities.

Nest Labs: $3.2 billion, 100% ownership since 2014

Android controls over 85% of the smartphone market, leaving its iPhone competitor with a (not so impressive) 11% market share. In 2018 Google reported a whopping $97.1 billion in revenue from January to September. Like most major tech companies, Alphabet hired prodigiously throughout the pandemic and up to 2022, then slashed costs and implemented layoffs in 2023. In 2019, when Page and Brin stepped down from their positions at Alphabet, Pichai—already Google’s CEO—assumed the position of CEO for Alphabet.

It targets companies that offer unique technologies or capabilities that complement its existing business lines or open new avenues for growth. Equipped with some of the deepest pockets on the planet, Alphabet’s acquisitive strategy has maintained its competitive edge while adapting to the rapidly changing technological landscape. Alphabet is no stranger to in-house innovations, but many of its most important business projects entered the company by way of acquisitions. The company’s acquisitions have been so successful that it has become too influential in its chosen market segments, sometimes in ways that violate anti-trust laws. Alphabet is the subject of a number of anti-trust lawsuits, some of which have already been decided against Alphabet.

What Companies Google & Alphabet Own: Visuals & Full List

Malta began as an attempt to make alternative energy more effective in the long term. Solar and wind energy plants generate plenty of energy when conditions are right, but supply and demand get out of sync. On sunny days, a solar plant might have excess power that’s lost when it can’t be used. And on still, windless days, a wind energy plant might not provide enough power for its community. Malta developed tools to store excess energy using grid-scale technology.

Some of these companies are subsidiaries of Google, while others are separately owned by Alphabet. CapitalG takes a different approach than GV, which is Google’s start-up fund. Instead of focusing on promising new enterprises, CapitalG is interested in established, fully-scaled companies.

After the user purchases a Pointy box, they plugs it into their barcode scanner and it creates a Pointy page of the product. Google purchased Pointy in 2020 for $163 million and is helping brick-and-mortar store owners establish their presence with this technology. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has two publicly traded share classes with somewhat distinct ticker symbols. GOOGLE shares are Class A shares, commonly known as common stock, with the standard one-share, one-vote structure. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Alphabet is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, and the third-largest company in the US, after Microsoft and Apple. Other Bets encompasses entities such as the research and development unit Google X, Google Fiber, health research company Verily, the venture arm GV, and equity investment fund CapitalG. Google remains the largest business within the Alphabet conglomerate, and includes Google Chrome, Google Pixel, Google Home, YouTube, search, Android, AdSense, Google Maps, and Google Play. Google Inc., the popular American search engine, was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Originally titled Backrub, the two then-Stanford University graduate students built the engine in their college dorms, according to Google.

With a complete feature set in hand, Google Cloud delivered its first operating profits in early 2023 without taking the proverbial foot off this division’s revenue accelerator. Going forward, Mandiant’s security expertise should help Google Cloud land lots of contracts that otherwise could have gone to other cloud computing platforms. In February 2022, Microsoft (MSFT) was reportedly interested in buying Mandiant. Google’s $23 per share offer was a 45% premium to the price shares traded for on Feb. 1, 2022 (prior to the Microsoft news). The deal was one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history—behind only Motorola Mobility, which Google purchased in 2012 for $12.5 billion.

But it’s fair to say that it was a spectacular business decision with an incredible return on the original buyout price. YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees who believed ordinary people would enjoy sharing their homemade videos online. By the summer of 2006, YouTube was already offering more than 100 million videos per day. Both technical problems that companies owned by google accompany rapid growth and lack of commercial success prompted YouTube to begin searching for a buyer. The deal closed after antitrust regulators in the European Union approved the acquisition with conditions directed at protecting users’ health data and preserving competition in the sector for wearable tech. Google stressed that the acquisition is about devices rather than data and made commitments that user data would not be used for Google ads.