Alphabet announced today who it will appoint as its new chief financial officer, saying it has hired pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and the company's CFO Anat Ashkenazi.
The news comes nearly a year after Alphabet confirmed the resignation of its current CFO, Ruth Porat, and said she would remain in the position until a replacement is found. Porat joined Alphabet, then known as Google, from Morgan Stanley in 2015.
Ashkenazi will begin his new role at the Google parent company on July 31, 2024, after serving in various roles at Eli Lilly for 23 years until joining the CFO hot seat in 2021, according to an SEC filing today. Eli Lilly resigned, with Ashkenazi reporting that she would remain in her position until July, after which she planned to “pursue career opportunities outside the pharmaceutical industry.”
Alphabet is a completely different proposition than Eli Lilly, known for drugs like drugs for clinical depression and diabetes, but Eli Lilly is an $800 billion company in its own right, so getting past that step isn't exactly difficult. Additionally, Alphabet already has existing partnerships with the healthcare and life sciences sectors through subsidiaries such as Verily and Calico.
It's also worth noting that Alphabet spun off an AI-based drug discovery company called Isomorphic Labs, founded by DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. The company signed a strategic agreement with Eli Lilly (and Novartis) earlier this year to help apply AI to drug R&D.
Ashkenazi will be based in the Bay Area and report directly to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“I am very pleased to have a strong CFO with a track record of strategic focus on long-term investments to drive innovation and growth,” Pichai said in a statement. “The AI era is giving us an incredible opportunity to transform at scale across our core products and create entirely new products and experiences for our users and customers. We look forward to working with Anat as we invest responsibly to support our next phase of growth.”
