Alphabet acquisition history

dMarc Broadcasting operated an automated advertising platform for the radio-broadcast industry, connecting advertisers directly to radio stations and streamlining the sale, scheduling, delivery and reporting of radio spots. Google acquired the Newport Beach, California company to extend its measurable, targeted advertising model beyond the web into radio, with plans to fold dMarc's technology into AdWords as a new ad-distribution channel.

Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media.Google Inc. — dMarc acquisition press release, January 2006

YouTube was the fast-growing consumer media platform that let people watch, upload and share original videos on the web. Google acquired it in an all-stock deal, agreeing that YouTube would keep operating independently to preserve its brand and community. The combination paired one of the largest online-video communities with Google's search, distribution and advertising infrastructure, opening new monetization paths for creators and professional content owners.

The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.Eric Schmidt — Chairman and CEO, Google (paraphrased from YouTube acquisition release, October 2006)

DoubleClick was a global leader in digital-marketing technology, providing ad-serving and campaign-management tools to advertisers, agencies and web publishers. Google acquired it for cash from private-equity owner Hellman & Friedman (with JMI Equity and management), combining DoubleClick's display-ad management expertise with Google's advertising platform. The deal gave Google the leading display-ad platform and broadened its tools for targeting, serving and measuring online ads.

With DoubleClick, Google now has the leading display ad platform, which will enable us to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media.Eric Schmidt — Chairman and CEO, Google (DoubleClick closing release, March 2008)

Motorola Mobility Holdings was the mobile-devices and home business spun out of Motorola, making Android smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes and holding a large portfolio of wireless patents. Google acquired the public company for $40.00 per share in cash, its largest acquisition at the time, to strengthen the Android ecosystem and bolster its patent position in mobile computing. Google said it would run Motorola Mobility as a separate business and keep Android open to all licensees.

The acquisition will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing.Google Inc. — Motorola Mobility closing release, May 2012

Wiz is a New York-headquartered cloud-security platform that connects to all major clouds and code environments to help organizations prevent cybersecurity incidents. Google agreed to acquire it for $32 billion in an all-cash transaction, its largest acquisition ever, with Wiz slated to join Google Cloud. Google positioned the deal as a bet on two AI-era trends: stronger cloud security and multicloud operation.

This acquisition represents an investment by Google Cloud to accelerate two large and growing trends in the AI era: improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds.Google LLC — Wiz acquisition announcement, March 2025

Looker was a unified business-intelligence and embedded-analytics platform that let organizations explore, analyze and act on data, with strong multi-cloud support and connectors to sources like Salesforce, Marketo and Zendesk. Google acquired it to broaden Google Cloud's analytics offering and give customers a complete data-analytics stack from ingestion to visualization. Looker joined Google Cloud while retaining its ability to work across multiple cloud environments.

Fitbit was a leading maker of wearable fitness trackers and smartwatches with a large base of health and activity data. Google acquired it to expand into wearables and combine Fitbit's device and health-and-wellness expertise with Google's software, AI and hardware. Google made binding commitments that Fitbit health data would not be used for Google ads and would be kept separate from advertising data, addressing regulatory privacy concerns.

Mandiant was a well-known cybersecurity company specializing in threat intelligence, incident response and dynamic cyber defense. Google acquired the public company and folded it into Google Cloud, pairing Mandiant's frontline expertise with Google Cloud's existing security portfolio to build an end-to-end security-operations suite. Mandiant retained its brand under Google Cloud.

Siemplify was a provider of security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technology that helps security teams manage and respond to threats more efficiently. Google acquired it and integrated the technology into Google Cloud's Chronicle security platform, rebranding it as Chronicle SOAR. The deal advanced Google Cloud's goal of unifying threat detection and response for security operations centers.

Actifio was a leader in backup and disaster recovery, letting customers protect virtual copies of data in native format, manage them across their lifecycle and reuse them for development and testing. Google acquired it to strengthen Google Cloud's business-continuity and data-protection offering for workloads running both on-premises and in the cloud. The technology later became part of Google Cloud's Backup and DR service.

AppSheet was an intelligent no-code application-development platform that let IT staff and business users build apps and automations without writing code. Google acquired it to give Google Cloud customers a way to create and extend applications drawing on tools like Google Sheets, Forms, Android, Maps and Analytics. The deal aimed to empower so-called citizen developers across industries.

North was a Canadian smart-glasses and wearable-computing company, maker of the Focals smart glasses, with roots in human-computer interaction and heads-up display technology. Google acquired it to bolster its ambient- and helpful-computing hardware efforts. The North team joined Google to work on next-generation devices.

Raxium was a startup developing single-panel MicroLED display technology for augmented and mixed-reality devices, an area where compact, high-efficiency displays are critical. Google acquired it to add deep expertise in microdisplays and to support its work on next-generation devices and immersive computing. The Raxium team joined Google's devices and services group.

Applied Semantics built software for online advertising, domain-name management, and enterprise information management, centered on its patented CIRCA semantic text-processing technology and an AdSense product that read the themes of a web page to serve relevant ads. Google acquired the company to strengthen its search and content-targeted advertising programs and to establish a Southern California product development center in Santa Monica.

Applied Semantics is a proven innovator in semantic text processing and online advertising.Sergey Brin — Google co-founder and President of Technology

Kaltix was a search-technology startup working on personalized and context-sensitive search methods to make finding web information faster and more relevant. Google acquired the young company to continue developing those personalization technologies within its own search platform.

Google and Kaltix share a common commitment to developing innovative search technologies that make finding information faster, easier and more relevant.Larry Page — Google co-founder and President of Products

Keyhole was a digital mapping company whose 3D geospatial visualization software let users stream satellite and aerial imagery, zoom from a global view down to street level, and search for points of interest such as hotels, hospitals, and ATMs. Google acquired it to give users a new visual search tool; the technology later became the foundation of Google Earth and fed into Google Maps.

This acquisition gives Google users a powerful new search tool, enabling users to view 3D images of any place on earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest.Jonathan Rosenberg — Vice President of Product Management, Google

Urchin Software made a web-analytics solution that helped site owners and marketers understand visitor behavior, optimize content, and measure marketing performance, offered as a hosted service, an installed product, and through hosting providers. Google acquired it to add measurement tools to its advertising and publishing suite; Urchin was relaunched as the free Google Analytics.

This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products.Jonathan Rosenberg — Vice President of Product Management, Google

Google acquired Upstartle, the startup behind Writely, a browser-based collaborative word processor that let people access, share, and co-edit documents online. The Writely team joined Google, and registrations were paused while the product was migrated onto Google's architecture. The technology became the foundation of the word-processing side of Google Docs.

everyone told us it was crazy to try and give people a way to access their documents from anywhere -- not to mention share documents instantly, or collaborate online within their browsers. But that's exactly what we did.Jen Mazzon — Google Writely Team

Google acquired @Last Software, the maker of SketchUp, a 3D modeling application. The two companies had already collaborated on a free plug-in that let SketchUp users place 3D building models into Google Earth. The acquisition brought the SketchUp team into Google to accelerate its goal of making 3D content creation broadly accessible.

Our little company was founded six years ago with the grand vision of bringing 3D to everyone; now that goal is truly within reach.Jeff Martin — Product Marketing Manager

Google acquired the Neven Vision team, which specialized in automatically extracting information from photos, including detecting whether an image contains a person and, potentially, recognizing people, places, and objects. Google folded the expertise into Picasa to make searching and organizing personal photo collections easier, laying groundwork for later face- and image-recognition features.

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo.Adrian Graham — Picasa Product Manager

Google acquired JotSpot, a company founded by Excite co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer that built easy-to-use wiki software for creating, managing, and sharing information online without needing to know HTML. JotSpot paused new registrations while migrating to Google's infrastructure; its technology later re-launched as Google Sites.

JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn't be more excited.Joe Kraus — JotSpot

Google acquired Adscape Media, a San Francisco-based in-game advertising company whose platform delivered ads dynamically with plot and storyline integration, plus demographic and geographic targeting and reporting for marketers. Google positioned in-game advertising as an area where it could add value for users, advertisers, and publishers, adding the Adscape team to its advertising business. Google stated the terms were confidential.

In-game advertising is an area where we believe Google could add a lot of value to users, advertisers and publishers.Google

Google acquired Tonic Systems, a San Francisco company that built Java-based presentation-automation and document-management tools. Google positioned the team and technology as a fit with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and it became a building block for Google's online presentations product. The deal was described as officially closed at announcement.

Google acquired Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, which turns statistical data into animated, moving graphics for presentations. Google planned to improve and expand the tool and make it freely available, applying it to development data such as regional income distribution and global health trends. The Trendalyzer team joined Google to help make statistics more useful and easier to visualize.

Google acquired GrandCentral Communications, a service that unifies a user's multiple phone numbers and voice mailboxes into a single web-accessible account, with features like one number ringing selected phones based on the caller, a central online voicemail box, call forwarding, spam blocking, and switching a live call between phones. The technology became the basis for what Google later launched as Google Voice.

Google agreed to acquire Postini, a provider of on-demand communications security and compliance services including message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement for email, IM, and other web-based communications, serving over 35,000 businesses and 10 million users. Google paid $625 million in cash and folded Postini's capabilities into Google Apps to give enterprise customers stronger security and compliance. Announced July 9, 2007; closed September 13, 2007.

With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes.Eric Schmidt — Chairman and CEO, Google

Google acquired FeedBurner, a Chicago-based leading provider of web-feed (RSS) distribution, management, and analytics tools that lets publishers analyze, optimize, and monetize their content, plus a feed advertising platform for targeted in-feed ads. Google saw it as a way to give content creators better publishing tools and to extend AdWords advertisers' distribution to a wider audience.

Google acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that made software for creating online slide presentations. Google folded Zenter's technology and team into the Google Docs & Spreadsheets effort to add presentation-sharing capabilities. It was one of the acquisitions (alongside Tonic Systems) that fed into Google's online presentations product.

Google acquired Jaiku, a company building applications for staying in touch with friends and family across both computers and mobile phones (microblogging / presence). At announcement, existing users could keep using the service while new users signed up for invitations, and Google said it planned to use Jaiku's ideas and technology in future web and mobile products.

Google acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high-resolution cameras for collecting aerial imagery. Google noted the firm's work was already familiar to Maps and Earth users, including high-resolution black-and-white imagery of New Orleans captured after Hurricane Katrina. Google said the technology was still in an R&D phase and would feed into its mapping services over time.

We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road.Stephen Chau — Product Manager, Google

Google agreed to purchase Panoramio, a Spain-based community photo website that lets photographers geo-locate, store, and organize their photos and view them in Google Earth. Panoramio's geotagged images had already been a default layer in Google Earth since the start of the year, and Google planned to further integrate the user-generated content into its mapping technologies.

I am pleased to tell you that we've agreed to purchase Panoramio, a website based in Spain that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken.John Hanke — Director for Maps, Earth and Local, Google

YouTube announced Google's purchase of Omnisio, a small California-based startup focused on making online video more useful and collaborative through advanced tools such as video annotation and clip mashups. YouTube said the team's technical expertise would help it expand what users can do with videos on the site.

The Omnisio team has tremendous technical expertise when it comes to advanced video tools and having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.The YouTube Team

Google announced it had signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology, arguing that video compression should be part of the web platform. Google said the deal remained subject to On2 shareholder and regulatory approval and was expected to close in Q4. The acquisition later yielded the VP8 codec and the WebM project.

we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.Jeremy Doig — Engineering Director – Video, and Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager, Google

Google announced it had closed its acquisition of AdMob, the mobile advertising company built by Omar Hamoui and team. Google said it would combine its search-advertising technology, resources, and expertise with AdMob's solutions for advertising on mobile websites and in mobile apps, making mobile advertising a central part of its business as mobile search volumes grew rapidly.

Today, we closed our acquisition of AdMob.Susan Wojcicki — Vice President of Product Management, Google

Aardvark was a social-search company whose technology let users ask questions in natural language and get answers from friends and their extended network. Its system analyzed each question's topic and routed it to people with relevant knowledge. Google acquired it to strengthen answering of specific questions better handled by a knowledgeable person than a webpage.

Picnik was one of the first services to bring photo editing to the cloud, letting users crop, retouch, and add effects to photos entirely within a web browser and integrate with photo-sharing services. Google acquired it to improve browser-based photo editing and integrate the capability into its own photo products.

DocVerse built technology enabling real-time collaboration directly within Microsoft Office, letting people share and co-edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents online. Google acquired the team to improve interoperability between desktop Office apps and cloud-based Google Docs, easing Office users' transition to the cloud.

ITA Software was a Boston-based flight-data company whose QPX engine organized airline flight times, availability, and fare pricing, powering flight search for many airlines and travel sites. Google acquired it to build its own flight-search tools; the technology became the foundation of Google Flights.

for many people, finding the right flight at the best price is a frustrating experience; pricing and availability change constantly, and even a simple two city itinerary involves literally thousands of different options. We'd like to make that search much easierMarissa Mayer — VP, Search Products & User Experience, Google

Slide was a social-technology company (led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin) that built widely used social apps and games reaching tens of millions of people. Google acquired the team to make its own services more socially aware and extend social features across Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we've already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we'll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.David Glazer — Engineering Director, Google

Metaweb maintained Freebase, an open semantic database of over 12 million real-world entities — people, places, movies, books, companies — and the relationships between them. Google acquired it to deepen search's understanding of real-world things and answer complex entity-based queries; the work fed into the Knowledge Graph.

The web isn't merely words—it's information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly.Jack Menzel — Director of Product Management, Google

Widevine provided video delivery technology including digital rights management (DRM), secure delivery, and video optimization used by studios, cable systems, and device makers to stream premium content securely across devices. Google acquired it to support high-quality, secure on-demand streaming (including on YouTube).

Phonetic Arts was a Cambridge, England speech-synthesis company whose technology generated natural-sounding computer speech from small samples of recorded voice. Google acquired it to advance text-to-speech (voice output), complementing existing voice-input products like Voice Search and Voice Actions.

That's why we're pleased to announce we've acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England.Mike Cohen — Manager of Speech Technology, Google

SayNow built a voice-messaging platform enabling voice messages, one-to-one and group calls integrated into social networks and mobile apps. Google folded its team into its voice efforts; days later, engineers combined SayNow technology with Twitter to launch a speak-to-tweet service during the 2011 Egyptian internet shutdown.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality.

fflick, built by a team of former Digg employees, analyzed Twitter and social-media data to gauge sentiment (originally movie reactions) and surface popular content and the conversations around it. YouTube acquired the team to connect viewers with videos discussed across the web and surface those conversations on YouTube.

So today we're excited to announce we've acquired Fflick, a talented team that analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions around it.Shiva Rajaraman — Group Product Manager, YouTube

zynamics was a German security firm specializing in reverse-engineering and malware analysis, known for tools such as BinDiff, BinNavi, and VxClass. Google acquired it in 2011 to strengthen malware detection and user protection; the BinDiff engine went on to power Google's large-scale malware-clustering pipeline.

Ever since zynamics joined Google in 2011, we have been committed to keeping our most valuable tools available to the security research community.

Admeld was a New York publisher-side yield optimization and ad management firm that helped large website publishers manage and maximize revenue from display ad inventory across many networks and exchanges. Google acquired it to improve its publisher-facing display advertising tools and simplify a complex ad-management landscape.

To help major publishers get the most out of the rapidly changing and growing display ad landscape, we've signed an agreement to acquire Admeld, a New York-based yield optimization firm.Neal Mohan — VP of Display Advertising, Google

Zagat is a pioneer of crowd-sourced consumer dining reviews, known for its 30-point rating scale, founded by Tim and Nina Zagat. Google acquired it to strengthen local search, Maps, and recommendations with a large, trusted base of restaurant and venue reviews and an experienced consumer-survey team.

So, today, I'm thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.Marissa Mayer — VP of Local, Maps & Location Services, Google

Wildfire Interactive built a social media marketing platform that let brands and agencies create, manage, and measure their presence, promotions, and ad campaigns across social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn) from one place. Google acquired it to give ad clients integrated social-marketing tools alongside search, display, and video.

With this in mind, today we're happy to share that the Wildfire team will be joining Google.Jason Miller — Product Management Director, Google

Quickoffice made mobile office productivity software that let users create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on phones and tablets, with strong file-format interoperability. Google acquired it to bring document-editing technology into Google Apps and give a more integrated cross-device experience.

We're happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions.Alan Warren — Engineering Director, Google

TxVia operated a fast, flexible, and highly reliable prepaid and payments processing platform that had supported management of over 100 million accounts since 2008 and was certified to the major payment networks. Google acquired it to complement its payments capabilities and accelerate the full Google Wallet vision.

Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've acquired payments technology company TxVia to complement our payments capabilities and accelerate innovation towards our full Google Wallet vision.Osama Bedier — VP of Wallet and Payments, Google

Nik Software built digital photo-editing tools and was the maker of Snapseed, an award-winning mobile photo-editing app (Apple's iPad App of the Year). Google folded the team in and brought Snapseed to Android, offering adjustments and creative filters to strengthen Google+ photo sharing on mobile.

Having welcomed Nik to the Google family, we're excited to bring their Snapseed app (last year's iPad app of the year) to Android.Vic Gundotra — SVP, Google

Waze is a community-driven mobile navigation app whose users share real-time traffic conditions, road hazards, and route updates to find the fastest routes. Google acquired the Israel-based company to strengthen Google Maps with Waze's live crowdsourced traffic data while keeping Waze operating as an independent product.

The Waze community and its dedicated team have created a great source of timely road corrections and updates.Brian McClendon — VP, Geo, Google

Channel Intelligence is a product-feed management service that helps merchants deliver high-quality product feeds across major shopping engines, including Google's Product Listing Ads, plus bid optimization and data-quality monitoring. Google acquired it to improve Google Shopping and help retailers increase return on ad spend.

Nest Labs makes connected home devices, most notably the Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke/CO alarm, that automate and add intelligence to everyday household hardware. Google acquired the company to accelerate its push into the connected home and to bring Nest's hardware-plus-software design expertise (led by former Apple iPod executive Tony Fadell) in-house.

Firebase provides a backend-as-a-service that lets developers build web and mobile apps with a realtime database, user authentication, and hosting without managing servers. Google acquired the team to strengthen its developer platform and, over time, folded Firebase into Google Cloud as a unified app-development platform.

Timeful built a smart scheduling app that used behavioral-science algorithms to help people find time for tasks, habits, and goals. Google acquired the team to bring intelligent time-management and smart-scheduling features into Gmail, Inbox, and Google Calendar.

Jibe Mobile operated a cloud platform for RCS (Rich Communication Services), the carrier-messaging standard meant to succeed SMS with richer features. Google acquired Jibe as part of its commitment to bring a modern, universal messaging experience to Android in partnership with mobile carriers. The deal was disclosed in Google's Android blog post committing to the RCS standard.

Synergyse offered an interactive, in-product training tool delivered as a Chrome extension that coached users through Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Docs. Google acquired it to make guided training a built-in part of the G Suite (now Google Workspace) offering and improve enterprise adoption.

Moodstocks was a Paris-based team building machine-learning and on-device image- and object-recognition technology for mobile. Google acquired it to strengthen its machine-learning research presence in France and improve visual recognition across products such as Google Photos. (Announcement is on Google's official French-language blog.)

Anvato provides a cloud media platform that automates encoding, editing, publishing, and secure distribution of video (OTT) content for large media and entertainment companies. Google acquired Anvato and folded it into Google Cloud Platform to offer an end-to-end video processing and workflow solution.

Orbitera runs a commerce platform that simplifies buying, selling, billing, and packaging of software in the cloud for ISVs, service providers, and channel partners. Google acquired it to support a multi-cloud software marketplace and ecosystem around Google Cloud Platform.

Apigee provides a leading API management platform that lets enterprises design, secure, deploy, monitor, and scale APIs across cloud and on-premises environments. Google acquired the publicly traded company to give Google Cloud enterprise-grade API management, a key building block for digital transformation and multi-cloud strategies.

FameBit runs a marketplace that connects online video creators with brands for branded-content and influencer marketing deals. Google acquired it to bring more branded-content opportunities and revenue to the YouTube creator community, pairing FameBit's marketplace technology with YouTube's scale.

Qwiklabs delivers hands-on, browser-based lab environments for learning cloud platforms and infrastructure software. Google acquired it to provide practical, hands-on training for Google Cloud Platform and G Suite and to help close the cloud skills gap.

Fabric is a modular mobile-app development platform—including the popular Crashlytics crash-reporting tool—that Twitter had built for developers. Google acquired the Fabric team and technology and moved it under the Firebase team to give developers a more unified set of tools for building, stabilizing, and growing apps.

Limes Audio, based in Sweden, develops technology that removes noise, distortion, and echo to improve voice quality in video and telephony conferencing. Google acquired the team to enhance audio quality in its G Suite communication products such as Hangouts and Chromebox for Meetings.

Kaggle hosts the world's largest online community of data scientists and machine-learning practitioners, known for its public datasets, notebooks (kernels), and prediction competitions. Google acquired it (announced at Google Cloud Next '17) to bring this community closer to Google Cloud's data and machine-learning services.

Owlchemy Labs is a virtual-reality game studio behind hits such as Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Google acquired the studio to build immersive VR experiences and develop new interaction models across platforms as part of its Google VR / Daydream efforts.

Bitium provides enterprise identity and access management, including single sign-on (SSO) and provisioning for a broad range of cloud applications. Google acquired it to advance its Cloud Identity vision and give enterprise customers unified identity, SSO, and app provisioning across cloud and mobile environments.

Google entered an agreement with smartphone maker HTC under which a team of HTC engineers—many already working with Google on Pixel—joined Google, along with a non-exclusive license to HTC intellectual property. The deal deepened Google's investment in first-party hardware and its Pixel program. Google paid $1.1 billion in cash.