Alphabet’s latest Google X business is in cybersecurity.
On Wednesday, Google’s parent company introduced Chronicle and described it in a Medium post as a “new independent business within Alphabet that’s dedicated to helping companies find and stop cyber attacks before they cause harm.”
Getting its start in X — the Google affiliate that has spawned Waymo’s self-driving cards and other so-called moonshots — Chronicle is focusing on cybersecurity intelligence and analytics as well as alerting businesses to malware threats.
“Security threats are growing faster than security teams and budgets can keep up, and there’s already a huge talent shortage,” the company said in the post.
This is the third X business to spin out and become its own Alphabet company, following Waymo and Verily.
Stephen, Gillett, the co-founder and CEO of Chronicle, is a former operating chief of Symantec. The Chronicle team started working on security at X in February of 2016.
Carey Nachenberg, who spent over two decades at Symantec, is part of the group, as is Will Robinson, a 13-year Google veteran. Bernardo Quintero, who built VirusTotal and sold it to Google in 2012, is also part of Chronicle.
As with all of Alphabet’s “other bets,” Chronicle will operate separately and roll up to the parent company.
“We’ll have our own contracts and data policies with our customers, while at the same time having the benefit of being able to consult the world-class experts in machine learning and cloud computing (among many other topics) that reside in other parts of Alphabet,” the company said.
