Key takeaways

• Google’s emerging tech portfolio is dominated by investments. Out of ~700 external activities of the company in the past five years (across ~80 emerging tech industries covered on the SPEEDA Edge platform), 70% were investments, followed by partnerships (27%) and acquisitions (3%).
• The top five areas of interest were 1) work (16% of all activities), 2) pharma & life sciences (12%), 3) information technology (10%), 4) transportation & logistics (9%), and 5) financial services (8%).
• Pharma & life sciences and work were the areas with the most investment activity. Google had invested in 47 pharma & life sciences startups (across 84 investment rounds) with precision medicine and AI drug discovery accounting for the most. There were 46 work-related startups that Google had invested in (across 78 rounds), and more than half of them were data infrastructure and analytics companies. 
• IT and transportation & logistics had the highest number of partnerships, and most were aimed at supporting Google’s in-house activities related to edge computing and autonomous driving. Most IT partnerships were edge computing-related; product collaborations to incorporate edge computing capabilities to Google Cloud and partnerships with network operators to explore edge computing solutions accounted for the most.
• Most partnerships in transportation & logistics were related to last mile delivery (LMD) automation and truck industry tech. Some notable ones included Google Wing’s partnerships with retailers and logistics providers to carry out drone-based deliveries, collaborations to develop and commercialize autonomous trucks, and agreements with automakers to integrate Google Assistant connectivity into vehicles.
• Most acquisitions were in work (4), sports & entertainment (3), and security (3). Almost all work-related acquisitions were data infrastructure and analytics startups and were mostly aimed at strengthening Google’s cloud offering and predictive modeling and analytics solutions. All acquisitions in the sports & entertainment space were related to extended reality (XR), while acquisitions in the security space were in next-gen cybersecurity and facial recognition startups. 
• There has been a notable increase in Google’s external activities in the IT space in the past two years, with growing interest in edge computing and no-code software. Hospitality & travel was the worst affected in the past two years due to slowdowns in activities related to online food delivery and travel tech.