Google SEC Paperwork Reveals It Paid Over $380 Million For Bebop

At the end of November, Google announced it was buying bebop, a cloud platform startup founded by former VMware CEO and co-founder Diane Greene. Today, the company filed paperwork with the SEC revealing the purchase price: $380,241,352 to be precise.

In addition, the paperwork revealed that Greene’s portion of the sale, 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock was exchanged for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 per share plus some additional cash. “Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund,” according to the filing.

The move was believed to be as much about bringing in Greene to lead its enterprise cloud effort as the bebop technology itself.  Little is known about bebop, a stealthy startup, beyond the fact it is a cloud development platform that is supposed to help enterprises build and maintain cloud applications. As such, it should give Google a more a complete enteprise cloud offering.

It’s certainly a healthy price tag for a company that hadn’t emerged from stealth yet, and suggests that it’s more than an acquihire to get Greene and her engineering team on board.

As we wrote at the time of the announcement referencing a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai, “Greene will run a new integrated enterprise cloud businesses, that will combine Google for Work, Cloud Platform, and Google Apps with a new consolidated product, engineering, marketing and sales team…,”

Steve Herrod,  who is managing partner at venture capitalist General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware spoke glowingly of Greene. “She is awesome and immediately changes the game for Google’s cloud efforts. The engineering team at bebop was outstanding as well and they’ll bring a ton of enterprise DNA to Google,” he wrote in an email at the time of the announcement.

Google is hoping to jump start its enterprise cloud business with this move and the price tag suggests that the company isn’t afraid to spend some money to get what it wants in terms of technology and personnel.

With Greene on board to run things and the bebop team and technology in the fold, it should be interesting to watch how the Google enterprise cloud strategy evolves this year.