Google’s healthcare business Verily lands $1B in new funding
Verily Life Sciences LLC, a healthcare-focused company that’s owned by Google LLC’s parent Alphabet Inc., is getting a big financial boost in the form of a $1 billion round of financing led by private equity firm Silver Lake.
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan also participated in the round announced today. It comes about two years after Verily secured $800 million in funding from Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Private Ltd.
Verily plans to splash the cash around, according to its Chief Executive Officer Andrew Conrad. He said the company will now look to invest in business development opportunities, potential acquisitions and other strategic partnerships.
“We are taking external funding to increase flexibility and optionality as we expand on our core strategic focus areas,” Conrad said in a statement. “Adding a well-rounded group of seasoned investors, led by Silver Lake, will further prepare us to execute as healthcare continues the shift towards evidence generation and value-based reimbursement models.”
Under the terms of the transaction, Silver Lake’s managing partner and managing director Egon Durban will join Verily’s operating board along with Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat.
Verily focuses on using technology to get a better understanding of human health and come up with new drugs, treatments and other methods to prevent, detect and manage disease.
The company has been researching potential treatments and diagnosis tools for a wide range of human afflictions. Its work includes using artificial intelligence to speed up the process of new drug discovery, detecting sleep apnea, researching better ways to collect blood samples and applying machine learning to retinal images to identify the risk factors of cardiovascular disease.
Verily has also created a kind of medical smartwatch with numerous sensors that can be used for longitudinal studies into human health. In addition, it embarked on an ambitious four-year clinical study in 2017 that seeks to establish a well-defined reference of what exactly constitutes good health and understand how people go from being healthy to being sick.
“Verily’s unique capabilities, world-class partnerships and bold vision are enabling the company to tackle the most significant problems impacting global healthcare,” Silver Lake’s Durban said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Andy and the entire Verily team in their mission to use cutting-edge science and technology to change the paradigm of care delivery and improve clinical outcomes.”
Photo: DarkoStojanovic/Pixabay
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