General
June 6, 2019
6 minutes read

Google Acquires Looker For $2.6 Billion

Looker CEO Frank Bien (left) and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian image: Google Google has announced it’s acquiring Looker, a…

Looker CEO Frank Bien (left) and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

image: Google

Google has announced it’s acquiring Looker, a Santa Cruz-based data analytics startup that raised $103 million in December at a $1.6 billion valuation. Google will pay $2.6 billion all-cash for the company. Looker will join Google Cloud upon completion of the acquisition. Looker has raised a total of $280.5 million in funding. Its backers include Premji Invest, Cross Creek Advisors, Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, Sapphire Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and CapitalG (affiliated with Google).

As of December when it last raised funding, Looker had nearly 600 employees and said its 2018 revenue grew 70% compared to the previous year, with the addition of nearly 500 customers. The new customers included Adyen, ESPN, Cisco, Marks and Spencer and Five Guys among others. Other of its notable customers include Spotify, Amazon, Lyft, IBM, Kickstarter, The Economist and more. While based in Santa Cruz, Looker also has offices in San Francisco, Boulder, Chicago, New York, London, Dublin and Tokyo.

Google Cloud’s President of Global Customer Operations, Robert Enslin

image: Google

Looker’s $2.6 billion price makes it one of Google’s biggest acquisitions, on par with previous acquisitions like Motorola ($12.5 billion), Nest ($3.2 billion), Waze ($1.3 billion), AdMob ($750 million), YouTube ($1.65 billion) and Dropcam ($555 million). This acquisition marks the first big move by former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian since he took over at Google Cloud last year.

Kurian, who previously spent more than 2 decades at Oracle and was one of its highest ranked executives, has also doubled down on salespeople since he took over at Google Cloud.

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