Google has just announced that they will be purchasing yet another company.
This time, the tech giant plans to buy out Nest Labs, a company that specializes in making thermostats. Nest Labs will be bought for a total of $3.2 billion which is shocking for a relatively small firm. The company only employees 300 people.
Nest Labs, based out of California, was founded by two former employees of Apple, which is why Google may view this acquisition as a special catch.
The CEO of Nest is Tony Fadell, otherwise known as the father of the iPod. His achievements at Apple are quite notable, he has worked on over 15 generations of Apple music players in addition to working on the very first iPhone. Both products have been attributed to Apple’s incredible success.
Nest Labs focuses on creating intelligent thermostats that is capable of learning behaviour patterns.
This means that it can predict when you will be in and out of the house and can adjust the temperature accordingly.
This way, if the user accidentally leaves the cooling on as they leave the house, it will automatically be adjusted thus sparing the user the extra cost on to their electric bill. In addition, they have created hardware that allows you to control thermostat settings from your smartphone.
Although Google plans to buy it this company, according to Tony Fadell, Nest Labs will still retain its own identity.
In a statement released by Google, chief executive Larry Page explains, “Nest’s founders, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, have built a tremendous team that we are excited to welcome into the Google family.”
Tony Fadell and Google co-founder Sergey Brin had their first unplanned encounter two years ago. Brin liked an early version of the Lab’s thermostat and according to reports, many employees at Google began to use it in their own homes.
Fadell explains, “They’ve always been keen on what we were doing, because they thought we had a crazy idea and they love crazy ideas.”
In addition to purchasing Nest Labs, Google has been on a purchasing spree, within the last few months the search giant has acquired two other companies.
Flutter, a company that specializes in human motion detection and recognition, was purchased last October for an estimated $40 million.
Shortly after, Google bought Boston Dynamics, a military firm that creates robot technology and hardware.
This latest addition to the Google-owned company roster confirms that the search giant has big plans for its future.
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