Docs: Verily revenue grew to $470M in the first nine months of 2022, up from $228M YoY, making it Alphabet's biggest subsidiary by revenue after Google
Jon Victor / The Information : Tweets: @brianmcc and @amir Tweets: Brian McCullough / @brianmcc : Narrative violation. That narrative being: what if sometimes the moonshots and other bets actually work? https://www.techmeme.com/... Amir Efrati / @amir : Exclusive: Google parent company Alphabet has never broken out financials of individual “other bets.” So here are financials of @Verily. Turns out Alphabet's biggest non-Google business is...selling insurance. @jon_victor_ https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
For years Alphabet folded Verily into 'Other Bets,' a segment whose quarterly disclosures told a grim story: roughly $150–180M in revenue against $1B-plus in operating losses, quarter after quarter — including a Q3 2021 operating loss of $1.29B on just $182M of revenue. The Information has now obtained internal documents Alphabet never chose to publish, breaking out individual bet financials for the first time.
The reveal upends the segment math: Verily alone booked $470M in the first nine months of 2022, more than double its year-ago pace, making it Alphabet's largest subsidiary after Google. Per the reporting, the life-sciences unit's biggest business is selling insurance — meaning the 'moonshot' carrying the portfolio is a payer business, not a hardware or autonomy play.
First-order effects
- Verily's disclosed run rate reframes Other Bets overnight: a unit previously buried inside a chronically loss-making line item is now Alphabet's second-biggest revenue source, and its insurance-led model becomes the visible template for what a successful bet looks like.
- Alphabet's long-standing refusal to break out individual bet financials is effectively ended by the leak, putting direct pressure on the company to start disclosing per-unit results in its own earnings.
Second-order effects
- Waymo, Fiber and the other bets lose the cover of the blended segment: their standalone economics are now implicitly benchmarked against Verily's doubling revenue, sharpening investor scrutiny of the capital-intensive bets that still drive the segment's billion-dollar losses.
- The 'narrative violation' Brian McCullough flagged — that some bets actually work — gives Alphabet management a proof point to justify selective funding, while weakening the case for treating all bets as a single protected R&D budget.
Third-order effects
- If Verily's trajectory holds, Alphabet's moonshot structure drifts from research lab toward a holding company of individually accountable businesses judged on their own P&L — with disclosure granularity forced by leaks and press rather than chosen by management.
- A pattern of one bet scaling through services like insurance while others burn cash points toward eventual pruning or separation of laggards, reshaping how Alphabet allocates across its non-Google portfolio.
The trend: Alphabet's Other Bets are shifting from an opaque, uniformly loss-making segment into a portfolio of individually accountable businesses, with Verily's insurance-led growth as the first demonstrated proof point.