In the first half of 2026 Alphabet paid out more cash for acquisitions than in the eleven years before, even as its deal count fell from 48 software acquisitions in 2015 to 2019 to 8 in 2023 to 2025. Across the period our records hold 76 software acquisitions by Alphabet, announced from 2015 to 2025 and since completed, which keeps it among the most active product-driven strategic buyers in our ranking.
Google now buys in two sizes, a small team that becomes a feature and a large platform that becomes a business line. The price rests on what your technology is worth inside Google Cloud, Search or its devices, and that value belongs to Google until another bidder makes it visible. Behind the offer sits one of the largest companies in the world, with $402.8bn of revenue in 2025 and a cloud business that grew 36 percent that year.
Alphabet’s annual and quarterly reports are the source for spend, purchase prices and the accounting. Our deal list, built from Mergermarket, those filings and press reports, covers closed acquisitions of control announced from 2015 to 2025, Other Bets companies included, and keeps the hardware makers, device teams, IT services firms and other businesses apart from the software deals. The sections below also show which parts of Alphabet do the buying.
Alphabet Companies: Who Does the Buying Inside Google
Alphabet reports three segments, and each one buys for its own reasons.
| Segment | 2025 revenue | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Services | $342.7bn | Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps, Google Play, Pixel and other devices |
| Google Cloud | $58.7bn | Google Cloud Platform, Workspace, security, data and AI services |
| Other Bets | $1.5bn | Waymo, Verily and other early businesses |
Google Cloud is the growth engine and the main buyer of software companies at scale. Its revenue rose from $33.1bn in 2023 to $58.7bn in 2025, its operating income reached $13.9bn, and Alphabet reported $242.8bn of contracted revenue still to be recognized at the end of 2025, mostly in Cloud. The three largest software acquisitions with a recorded value, in analytics and in cybersecurity, all went into Google Cloud.
Google Services buys technology for its consumer products and its hardware. Other Bets buy rarely: Verily, Waymo and Intrinsic made 3 of the 76 software acquisitions, one each. Alphabet also invests through GV and CapitalG, its venture and growth funds, and Gradient Ventures for early-stage AI. Those funds take minority stakes, and an investment from one of them is a separate track from an acquisition by Google.
Alphabet names an acquisition in its filings only when the deal is material to the group, and every other purchase appears inside a single annual total.
How Many Companies Google Buys
Alphabet closed 76 acquisitions of software companies announced from 2015 to 2025: 12 in 2015, 14 in 2016, then between 5 and 9 a year until 2022, and 2, 4 and 2 in the three years since.
The early years were a buying spree in apps, developer tools and mobile software, 48 acquisitions from 2015 to 2019. The count then fell to 20 for 2020 to 2022 and 8 for 2023 to 2025. Microsoft, the other product strategic that front-loaded its buying, follows the same curve in our ranking of software acquirers, while IBM und Cisco kept buying through the cycle.
Spending moves on a different rhythm. Alphabet’s cash flow statement shows $20.9bn spent on acquisitions and purchased intangible assets from 2015 to 2025, with single deals behind most of the peak years: the analytics platform in 2019, the wearables maker in 2021 and the cybersecurity company in 2022, while the filings report 2024’s total only in aggregate. The first half of 2026 alone came to $33.7bn, as the cloud security platform agreed in March 2025 and an energy and data center developer agreed in December 2025 closed in March 2026.
The filings also put the small deals in proportion. In 2016 and 2017 the acquisitions Alphabet reported only in aggregate cost $448M and $322M in total. For most companies Google buys, the price is immaterial to a $402.8bn business, and the filings treat it that way.
What Size of Company Google Buys
An enterprise value is on record for 14 of the 76 software acquisitions, 18 percent. The median is $180M, with an interquartile range of $100M to $443M, and two of the 14 were above $500M. Disclosure follows the larger deals, and most of the companies Google buys are young businesses whose price stays private, so the typical acquisition sits well below these figures.
The size distribution has two peaks. At one end sit young companies with a product Google can fold into an existing service. At the other end sit platforms with their own customers and revenue, bought to make Google Cloud or Google’s devices competitive in a category. The cloud, data and security deals with a recorded enterprise value have a median of $290M, the highest of any group.
For a business with real revenue, the question is which of the two your company is to Google. In our view, a company with paying enterprise customers and a product that fills a gap in Google Cloud is priced as a platform, and one whose product duplicates something Google already sells is priced as a team, whatever its revenue.
What Google Buys
| Thema | 2015-2019 | 2020-2025 | Gesamt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud, data, security and developer software | 23 | 17 | 40 |
| Consumer apps, content and AI assistants | 22 | 5 | 27 |
| Device software: wearables, audio and health sensing | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| Other Bets: health, autonomy and robotics software | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Total software | 48 | 28 | 76 |
| Outside software: 8 IT services, 28 other (11 hardware and device teams) | 21 | 15 | 36 |
The table is our classification of the 76 software acquisitions by what the target did and where it went inside Alphabet. Beyond those, our records show 36 more acquisitions: 8 IT services firms, the incident response firm Mandiant among them, and 28 other businesses. Of those 28, 11 are hardware makers and device engineering teams, Fitbit among them, and the rest range from payments apps, content and creator services and a machine learning community to insurance, broadband and a data center developer.
Enterprise software is just over half of what Google buys, 40 of the 76, and it carries the money: both software acquisitions above $500M were cloud analytics and security platforms. The mix inside that group has moved from developer tools and app infrastructure in 2015 and 2016 toward data integration, migration, backup and, since 2022, security and AI developer tools. Security is now the core of Google Cloud’s buying, from security operations software to cloud security posture management.
Consumer apps have faded from 22 deals in 2015 to 2019 to 5 since; the early ones became features of Google Photos, Assistant, Maps and YouTube. Device software rose from 2 deals to 4 across the two periods: audio, wearables and health sensing, much of it for Pixel devices and Android.
In artificial intelligence, Google builds its own models through Google DeepMind, and its AI acquisitions since 2023 have been small: four makers of AI developer and design tools in 2024 and 2025. For larger AI teams Google has used a different route. In 2024 the founders of Character.AI rejoined Google under a licensing agreement, and in 2025 Google licensed Windsurf’s technology and hired its chief executive and engineers after OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf fell apart. In both cases the company stayed independent and Google acquired a license and people, a structure we return to below.
Where Google Buys
Alphabet bought software companies in 13 countries. The United States leads with 55 of the 76, followed by Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom with 3 each, then France, Ireland and Sweden with 2 each, and six more countries with one each. By region, 13 were in Europe across eight countries, 3 in Canada, 3 in Israel and 2 in Asia-Pacific.
Israel carries more weight than its country count shows. Several Israel-founded companies that Google Cloud bought sit in our records under their US headquarters, including the cloud security platform Wiz, a security operations platform and companies in cloud storage and migration.
Outside the United States and Israel, Google buys technology where it finds it, from a computer vision team in Belarus to a voice software company in Sweden. These are capability purchases, and the location follows the team.
What Google Pays: Acquisition Prices
Google publishes the price of an acquisition only when it is material, and most of what it buys is private, so the public record of what it pays is thin. One of the 76 software acquisitions carries both a published price and the target’s revenue, the takeover of a listed company in API management, and a single deal is too few for a median under our rule for publishing a multiple.
The better evidence comes from Alphabet’s own accounting.
Every year from 2015 to 2022, Alphabet’s filings split what it paid into cash, technology, customer relationships, other net assets and goodwill, the part of the price above the fair value of everything identifiable. Across $16.8bn of acquisitions allocated in those notes, 73 percent of the price was goodwill, and the annual share ranged from 60 to 82 percent. The largest deal in Alphabet’s history, closed in March 2026, came in at 77 percent.
Alphabet attributes that goodwill primarily to the synergies it expects after each acquisition, and under US accounting rules goodwill also carries the value of the assembled team. Google pays mainly for what a company becomes inside Google. The identifiable assets are a small part of the price, and Alphabet writes the acquired technology off quickly, over 3.5 to 4.8 years in its 2015 to 2022 notes. A seller who prices the business on its own earnings is negotiating over the smaller part of what Google values.
The benchmark for a stand-alone price is the private software market. Across private software acquisitions in our Software-Bewertungsmultiplikatoren research the median is 3.7x revenue (n=1,325) and 19.0x EBITDA (n=622). Where your price lands against that benchmark depends on how much of the value Google expects to create it shares with you, and a second bidder is the clearest test of it.
One more feature changes the arithmetic for founders. Alphabet states that its purchase prices exclude post-acquisition compensation arrangements. Retention packages and equity awards for the people who join are paid as employee compensation, outside the price shareholders receive. For a founder, the total value of a Google offer is the price plus the package, and the split between the two decides how much reaches investors and how much depends on staying.
Have an offer from Google?
If you have an offer from Google or another Alphabet company on your desk, talk to us before you answer it. Google is a strong buyer: it pays in cash, it has cleared even its largest acquisition unconditionally with competition authorities, and across the deals in its filings 73 percent of what it paid was goodwill, value it expects to create inside Google. Its offers also separate the price from the retention package, and it prices against more than a decade of its own deals, few of which are public. Our job is to find the buyers who will compete with it, set the price against what your technology is worth to them, and negotiate the split between price and package while there is still room to move it. A better deal may come from a rival bidder, and that competition alone is the surest route to a higher valuation from Google itself. Call us before you sign a letter of intent.
How Google Structures a Deal
Google buys whole companies for cash. Every software acquisition in our records was for 100 percent of the company. The one deal in its filings paid in shares came in 2015, when it paid for a cloud development platform almost entirely in Alphabet Class C stock and the company’s chief executive joined Google.
The price arrives in two parts for the people who join: the purchase price for shareholders and a compensation package for employees, recorded separately in Alphabet’s accounts. Both need negotiating, and the package is where the terms of staying sit.
The license-and-hire structure is the alternative for AI companies. Google pays for a license to the technology and hires the founders and part of the team, and the company continues with the remaining staff and its investors. For shareholders it delivers a payment and an independent company; for the people who move, the terms are Google’s employment terms. If Google proposes it, compare it with a full acquisition on what each group of shareholders and employees receives.
Regulatory review sets the timetable for larger deals. The cybersecurity company Google bought in 2022 closed six months after announcement. Its largest acquisition, agreed in March 2025, took twelve months and was cleared unconditionally by authorities in the United States, the European Union, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey. In 2019 Alphabet obtained the clearances to close its analytics acquisition and then waited for a UK review before it could integrate the business. Alphabet also operates under the September 2025 remedies ruling in the US search case, which banned exclusive search distribution deals and ordered data sharing with qualified competitors while rejecting the government’s request to divest Chrome and Android.
For a seller, a long review means a long period between signing and closing in which the business runs under a purchase agreement. Negotiate the limits on how you run the business in that period, and the date by which Google must close, as carefully as the price. For how an approach fits into a wider sale, see Software-Unternehmen verkaufen und strategische versus finanzielle Käufer.
What Happens After Closing
Most companies Google buys become features. The public record of its deals maps them onto Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Assistant, Android, Firebase, YouTube and Google Cloud, and the acquired brand disappears into the product. If your brand matters to you or your customers, raise it before the letter of intent, because Google’s default is integration.
The large platforms keep more of their identity. When Google closed its 2022 cybersecurity acquisition it said it would retain the Mandiant brand, and in 2024, when founder Kevin Mandia stepped down, Google said the brand would stay in its consulting practice, with the consulting and threat intelligence leaders reporting to Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian. Its 2026 security acquisition joined Google Cloud with a commitment that its products would continue to run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
Consumer integration runs deeper. Google moved Fitbit users onto Google accounts from 2023, ending Fitbit’s own log-in. Plan for your product, your customers’ accounts and your data to move onto Google’s systems over time.
Founders who join become Google employees, and their package is tied to staying. The accounting reflects the same view of what Google bought: technology written off over about four years and goodwill that stays on the balance sheet, $33.4bn of it at the end of 2025. The team and what it builds next sit inside that goodwill.
Google’s Competitive Position as an Acquirer
In our ranking of software acquirers, Alphabet sits among the most active product strategics, with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Salesforce.
What sets Google apart is the contrast between its deal count and its spend: 8 software acquisitions from 2023 to 2025, and since then more spent on one acquisition than on all its deals of the previous eleven years. For cloud and security platforms its rivals are the other cloud providers and the large security vendors, and for AI teams the other largest technology companies.
For a seller in cloud infrastructure, data or security, Google is one of a handful of buyers able to pay for strategic value, and the others in that handful are its direct competitors. That is the setting in which a competitive process works best: each bidder knows what losing the category would cost.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Google?
Google is buying at the top of its range in money and the bottom of its range in deal count. Its cloud business grew 36 percent in 2025, with a contracted backlog that Alphabet expects to recognize just over half of within two years, and its 2026 spending shows it will pay for a platform that strengthens Google Cloud’s position in security and AI infrastructure.
The wider software market repriced in early 2026, as AI coding agents cast doubt on parts of a sector that we saw as already carrying excessive valuations. In our March 2026 webinar on SaaS valuations we noted that the businesses holding up best were smaller, vertically focused and serving mission-critical workflows, and that buyers now ask how a business is addressing AI disruption risk.
In security, data infrastructure, AI developer tools and device technology, Google has bought recently and has the cash to keep buying. Its recent AI deals have been team purchases and license-and-hire agreements, and for a company whose product Google could reproduce with its own models, that is the offer to prepare for. Prepare the answer on what your product does that Google’s models leave undone before the first conversation. The latest prices are in our Software-Bewertungsmultiplikatoren Analyse.
Why You Need an M&A Advisor When Google Approaches You
The buyer has closed 76 software acquisitions since 2015 and sets the structure of every offer; the owner across the table is selling one company.
Establish what the business is worth before the first offer arrives, both on its own and to the buyers who need it. Google’s accounting shows that most of what it pays reflects value it expects to create, so a price built only on your revenue or earnings leaves that part of the negotiation to Google.
Then bring in one or two other buyers. In cloud, data and security, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow and the large security vendors buy in the same categories, and private equity platforms offer a different trade. A competing bid tests the price and tells you whether Google sees your company as a platform or a team.
Negotiate the package as hard as the price: the split between purchase price and retention, the vesting terms, the conditions that apply between signing and closing and, if Google proposes a license and hiring deal, what each group of shareholders and employees receives against a full sale. The figures on this page describe a market; your company will be priced in a negotiation.
That is the work we do for owners of software and technology businesses while they keep running the company, and running it well through the process matters, because how the business performs ends up in the price. For the wider field of buyers, see our ranking of software acquirers.
Über Aventis Advisors
Aventis Advisors is an M&A advisor for software and technology companies. We believe the world would be better off with fewer but better quality M&A deals, done at the right moment for the company and its owners. Our goal is to provide honest, insight-driven advice that lays out all the options clearly, including the option to keep the status quo.
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