Verily, an Alphabet company, announced a $1 billion investment round, led by global technology investment firm Silver Lake, to support investments in healthcare and life sciences strategic partnerships and potential acquisitions.
Other new investors in the round include Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and other global investment management firms. Ruth Porat, chief financial officer at Alphabet, and Egon Durban, managing partner and managing director of Silver Lake, will be nominated to join Verily’s operating board.
“We are taking external funding to increase flexibility and optionality as we expand on our core strategic focus areas,” said Andrew Conrad, CEO of Verily, in a prepared 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.”
South San Francisco-based Verily has described its dual objectives as creating tools and user-friendly platforms that capture a deeper and broader set of health data and organizing the data so that it is useful and actionable.
In December Verily announced that it would work with Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. to develop a medication adherence pilot project. Walgreens and Verily will deploy devices and other approaches designed to improve medication adherence. Walgreens, together with Onduo, Verily’s joint venture with Sanofi, will also launch a virtual diabetes solution to Walgreens employees and family members with Type 2 diabetes through the Walgreens employee health plan. Onduo provides tools, coaching and remote access to specialty doctors to help people with diabetes to manage their condition anytime, anywhere.
Walgreens said it would become a retail pharmacy development and commercialization partner to Verily, and the organizations have agreed to work on and explore ways to improve access to advanced healthcare technologies and solutions – which may include sensors and software to help prevent, manage, screen and diagnose disease – with a shared goal of scaling deployment at Walgreens retail locations.
In Juy 2018 Verily announced a joint venture with ResMed to study the health and financial impacts of undiagnosed and untreated sleep apnea, and develop software solutions that enable healthcare providers to more efficiently identify, diagnose, treat and manage individuals with sleep apnea and other breathing related sleep disorders.
