Alphabet was created in 2015 to separate Google's core search and advertising business from its many other ventures
Alphabet Inc. serves as the parent holding company of Google, Waymo, DeepMind, and several other technology and life sciences ventures.
Alphabet $GOOGL Inc. is the publicly traded holding company that owns Google and a collection of other businesses spanning technology, life sciences, and venture investment. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and trades on the Nasdaq $NDAQ exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG.
Google itself was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were doctoral students at Stanford University. The company began as a search engine and grew into one of the world's largest advertising platforms, generating the vast majority of its revenue by selling ads alongside search results and across a vast network of websites and apps. Google also operates YouTube, the Chrome browser, the Android mobile operating system, the Gmail email service, and Google Maps, among many other consumer products.
Alphabet was created in 2015 through a corporate restructuring that Page and Brin designed to give greater independence to businesses operating outside Google's core search and advertising model. Under the new structure, Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet, focused on internet products and services. Other subsidiaries — known internally as "Other Bets" — operate as separate companies with their own leadership. These have included Waymo, which develops autonomous vehicle technology; Verily, a life sciences research company; and DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London that Alphabet acquired in 2014.
Google Cloud, which sells computing infrastructure and software services to businesses, operates as a distinct segment within Google rather than as an Other Bet, and has grown into a significant revenue source alongside the core advertising business.
Alphabet's corporate structure gives Page and Brin, along with early Google investor Eric Schmidt, super-voting shares that preserve their control over major decisions regardless of their economic ownership stake. The company is one of the largest corporations in the world by market capitalization and is frequently grouped with a small number of other large U.S. technology firms that dominate global digital infrastructure.
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