- Verily (formerly known as Google Life Sciences) announced it has hired Deepak Ahuja as its chief financial officer
Verily (formerly known as Google Life Sciences) — which is the health and life sciences division of Google’s parent company Alphabet — has hired Deepak Ahuja as its chief financial officer. Ahuja is known for previously working at Tesla as CFO between 2008 and 2015 and again between 2017 and 2019. Before that, Ahuja was an executive at Ford Motor Company.
Why did Ahuja join Verily? Ahuja told CNBC that he made the decision after meeting Verily CEO Andy Conrad.
“Health care is in a state of crisis,” said Ahuja via CNBC. “Verily has a combination of solutions, which I see as redefining how we approach the sector by lowering costs and improving care. That’s near and dear to my heart.”
Verily is partnered with a number of companies for various initiatives. For example, Verily is working with Dexcom for building a new sensor for tracking blood sugar for people with type 2 diabetes. And Verily is also working on a project with ResMed to help diagnose people with sleep apnea. Plus Verily has partnerships with Novartis, Pfizer, and several other major drug companies.
Vivian S. Lee, President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences, oversees the aspect of the business where the company works with hospitals and health systems in setting up new payment models such as paying doctors based on patient health outcomes instead of the volume of the procedures.
While Verily was originally incubated at Alphabet, the company has been making moves towards becoming independent. For example, the company raised $1 billion in funding led by Silver Lake about a year ago. This funding enabled the company to increase its flexibility and around that time Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat joined the board.
It’s also worth mentioning that Ahuja has experience in taking companies public as helped drive the Tesla Motors IPO in 2010. This may indicate Verily’s plans sometime in the near future.
Another recent key hire Verily made was Scott Burke. Burke is now the head of Software at Verily. Prior to joining Verily, Burke was the CTO of Helix and an SVP of Advertising and Data Platforms at Yahoo. Plus Verily also hired former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) national coordination of IT Vindell Washington as the chief clinical officer of its platform business.
Going forward, Verily’s current CFO Duncan Welstead will continue overseeing financial operations for the company. Welstead is known for overseeing Verily’s funding rounds since the early days of the company. Since spinning out of Google, Verily has raised $1.8 billion.
