Jessica Mega, Verily’s chief medical officer
In fact, Alphabet’s life sciences group has raised $ 700 million in fresh capital to expand its commercial business, including its Baseline Healthcare clinical platform, which it has used for Covid-19 research.
The investment comes not just from Alphabet, but from other investors outside Google’s parent company who had already invested in Verily, including Temasek, OntarioTeachers ’Pension Plan and Silver Lake. Verily also said she will also use the funds to “progress” in several of her life sciences programs, including surgery, pathology and immunology.
It is the company’s third round of investments in recent years. In 2017, Verily raised $ 800 million in foreign capital from Temasek in Singapore and in January 2019 raised $ 1 billion in a round of financing led by private equity firm Silver Lake.
The final round of financing comes when parent company Alphabet increases foreign investment for its so-called “Other bets” to position them for future independence. The division was created under former Alphabet CEO Larry Page, who resigned in December 2019 and includes a number of nascent long-term companies, including the Verily companies, the Waymo automobile and the urban innovation Sidewalk Labs.
In early 2020, Alphabet’s new CEO, Sundar Pichai, hinted at imposing more discipline on other bets by possibly selling stakes in some of them to outside investors.
In its most recent earnings report for the third quarter of 2020, Alphabet posted a quarterly revenue of other bets of $ 178 million compared to $ 155 million the previous year, a minimum percentage of global quarterly revenue of the company $ 46.1 billion in the quarter. Meanwhile, the division’s operating losses expanded to $ 1.1 billion, up from $ 941 million the previous year.
Verily says the Baseline Project’s mission is to “collaborate to build the next generation of health tools and services,” an initiative that maps the health data points used in clinical research. This research is used in collaboration with other researchers, clinicians, engineers, designers and volunteers, according to the Baseline website.
Last March, the company launched the Project Baseline website for patients with Covid-19. Then, in May, the company said it would launch an antibody research study against the virus. During the summer, he opened a clinical lab in southern San Francisco to create more lab capacity for Covid-19 testing.
According to its funding announcement Thursday, Verily says it examined and tested nearly two million people at 351 test sites throughout the pandemic.
In August, the company announced that it was taking out health insurance by creating a subsidiary to apply technology to a type of employer-sponsored insurance known as “stop-loss”. Vivian Lee, president of Verily’s healthcare platforms, told CNBC at the time that the company plans to help business customers better manage their diabetes worker population.
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