Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cut most of the jobs at Area 120, its in-house incubator for new projects, as part of a broad wave of layoffs across the company.
(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cut most of the jobs at Area 120, its in-house incubator for new projects, as part of a broad wave of layoffs across the company.
Three projects in the incubator will “graduate” later this year, meaning they will be folded into Google, a company spokesperson said Friday.
“We have made the difficult decision to wind down the majority of the Area 120 team,” the spokesperson said.
The managing partner of Area 120 remains with the company, the spokesperson said. Virtually all other workers who weren’t involved in the three projects have lost their jobs, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The cutbacks are part of a sweeping reduction at Mountain View, California-based Alphabet, which is eliminating about 12,000 jobs — more than 6% of its workforce. The company follows Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other tech giants in making major layoffs.
Launched in 2016, Area 120 offers select employees the opportunity to work on small startups that live inside Google. “Many of Google’s best ideas begin as passion projects,” the Area 120 website explains. Among the incubator’s biggest hits was GameSnacks, a gaming platform launched in 2020 that caters to people using low-memory devices on slow cellular networks.
Google made another round of cuts to Area 120 in September, when some teams at the incubator were notified that their projects had been reorganized or canceled. A company spokesperson said at the time that Area 120 would be “shifting its focus to projects that build on Google’s deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems.”
(Updates with Area 120’s history startin in sixth paragraph.)
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