Google spends 2.600 million dollars per looker.

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The biggest acquisition in Google's history was in 2014 when it paid $ 3.2 billion for Nest, a hardware company specializing in connected home and IoT. Today Google made its second largest purchase by disbursing 2,600 million dollars by Looker, a data analysis software company.

This purchase is the first of its kind, since such a large amount of money had never been paid before by a relatively new company, and whose product was pure software, not a service or a device.

And... What is Looker?

Looker was born in 2012 and today has about 800 employees, is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, and is dedicated to data analysis of approximately 1,600 customers worldwide. In his short life, Looker has managed to raise 281 million dollars in risk capital and was valued at 1,600 million dollars. Well, Google decided to pay 1,000 million more to keep it.

Looker software allows companies to define calculations for income or the performance of high-value customers, with this information is able to show trends without the need for complicated formulas. Solutions such as Tableau and Power BI from Microsoft are currently the main competitors of Looker.

Looker will join Google Cloud, being the first big acquisition for the division and for the new CEO Thomas Kurian, who joined in November of last year. Today, Google Cloud is in third place, in terms of revenue, after the offers from Amazon and Microsoft, so they are looking to offer new options to increase their market share.

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According to Kurian, Google and Looker share more than 350 customers and this acquisition will fill in some gaps in the division and complement its service offering. Kurian explains that his goal is to win customers with specialized software, while the competition is committed to more general tools.

"This combination (Google + Looker) will provide an end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze and visualize data through Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, local databases and ISV applications."

Recently, Looker exceeded 100 million dollars in revenue, which is an impressive 70% growth over its previous year's figures.

Due to the transaction figure, this agreement will be subject to regulatory approval, but it is expected to close at the end of this year if everything goes according to plan.