A Singaporean investment company, Temasek, has invested $800 million into the Alphabet-owned Verily, a former division of Google previously known as Google Life Sciences. The two firms made the announcement on Thursday, adding how their partnership will bring them one step closer to commercializing Verily’s healthcare products and services and launching them globally at some point in the future. Temasek’s investment will be made in several installments over the course of 2017. The first and biggest installment is scheduled to be completed soon while the rest will follow in the second half of the year, the companies said. In exchange for its investment, Temasek will receive a minor stake in Alphabet’s medical tech company, though neither party disclosed more details on that front.
As a part of this deal, one of Temasek’s executives will join Verily’s Board of Directors, but the Singapore-based investment firm has yet to announce its nominee. This move makes sense in the context of Temasek’s previous ventures seeing how the Asian firm often invested in healthcare and related technologies, as well as life sciences. The company’s funding of Verily also coincides with its growing expansion ambitions which are mostly focused on the West and have recently materialized in the form of a new San Francisco office that was opened several months ago. While far from insignificant for Verily, Temasek’s investment represents only a small part of the firm’s current assets as its net portfolio value reportedly reached $180 billion in 2016.
Verily is one of the several companies which Alphabet describes as “Other Bets” during its financial reports. The term is meant to imply that none of the businesses under this category generate any significant profits for its parent company, even though it was reported that Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed how Verily is doing better than the likes of Fiber and Nest. Regardless of its current business performance, it seems that Alphabet isn’t the only company that has faith in Verily and its products, as evidenced by the fact that Temasek was willing to part with a significant sum in exchange for a minority stake in a firm that has yet to generate any meaningful profits.