Google has now finally disclosed that it paid $380.2 million to acquire Bebop, a startup from VMware co-founder and former chief executive Diane Greene. Greene is now part of Alphabet’s board of directors and is handling Google’s cloud businesses.
Greene to donate proceeds
In a SEC filing on Monday, Alphabet said, “Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of Bebop stock for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each in the Merger, plus cash for fractional shares.”
Greene has decided that she won’t retain a major portion of the money Bebop will receive from the deal and will give it away to charity.
“Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund and the total amount has been calculated at $148.6 million approximately,” the filing read.
After the acquisition, Bebop is continuing to work on its development platform, says VentureBeat, citing multiple reports. In an earlier blog post on the deal, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai described the platform as one that makes building and maintenance of enterprise applications easier.
Good addition to Google’s cloud business
The SEC filing notes that Bebop was merged into an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. In other words, it can be said that the start-up has not been submerged into the greater Google as of now. The Internet firm is well known for web search and online advertising, but the role offered to Greene indicates that now the company has a seasoned enterprise software veteran with good knowledge and expertise in selling to big companies.
Steve Herrod, a managing partner at venture capitalist General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware, says, “She is awesome and immediately changes the game for Google’s cloud efforts. The engineering team at bebop was outstanding as well and they’ll bring a ton of enterprise DNA to Google.”
Behoop and Greene are a good addition to the cloud business where Google is competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Behoop and Greene will help the Internet firm jump-start its enterprise cloud business, and the price the company paid indicates it is not afraid of spending money to get what it wants in terms of technology and personnel.
On Monday, Alphabet shares closed down 2.39% at $759.44. In 2015, the stock closed up by over 43%, while in the last one month, it is down by almost 3%.
