- Verily, a Google spinoff focused on medical tech, has raised billions in funding.
- Nearly six years in, Verily looks more like a scattershot collection of experiments than a game-changer.
- The company’s struggles are a case study in the power, and the limitations, of tech industry hubris.
A year ago, as the United States confronted the first global pandemic in a century, Donald Trump assured a panicked nation that help was on the way. It was coming, he said, from Google, which planned to provide a digital platform to conduct Covid-19 testing. This came as a surprise to Google as well as to Verily Life Sciences, the Google-affiliated entity that had in fact told the White House it conceivably could pull off such a project.
That Trump didn’t know the difference between Google and Verily, or that no such initiative had yet begun, is more telling than merely as an early example of the misinformation and plain-old made-up stuff Trump would go on to spew from the Presidential lectern. A year later Verily isn’t much better known or understood, either to the general public or even the medical industry it purports to be revolutionizing. (It did, however, go on to build a well-received multi-state Covid testing operation.)
With this anniversary in mind, I have spent the last week or so trying to understand what exactly Verily is. What emerges is a picture of a secretive, exceedingly well-funded collection of medical-related science projects without a cohesive business to speak of.
