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Alphabet’s Google To Acquire Looker for $2.6B

Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced this morning its plans to buy Looker, a business intelligence software and big data analytics company, for $2.6 billion in cash.

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Founded in 2011, Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Looker has raised a total of $280.5 million in its lifetime, according to its Crunchbase profile. Backers include Kleiner Perkins, Meritech Capital Partners and First Round Capital, among others. Once the acquisition closes later this year, Looker will be folded into the Google Cloud umbrella.

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In a press release, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the addition of Looker to its cloud offerings “will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation.”

Also, in a blog, Kurian pointed out that Looker extends Google’s business analytics offerings by helping it “offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualizing results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows.”

“It will also help us deliver industry specific analytics solutions in our key verticals,” he said.

The companies are not strangers to each other, considering an existing partnership where they share more than 350 joint customers, including Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence, and Yahoo!.

The buy marks Google’s first “big” acquisition since Kurian, a former Oracle exec, joined the company earlier this year, noted MarketWatch. In February, it picked up Alooma, which offers a real-time data pipeline as a service. Over time, Google has acquired 233 companies (that we know of), according to its Crunchbase profile, including at least nine last year.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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