Bebop

Bebop was a stealth-mode startup founded in 2012 by Diane Greene, a prominent figure in the tech industry known for co-founding VMware. Her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford professor and co-founder of VMware, also played a foundational role in Bebop. The company operated as a development platform designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of complex enterprise applications. The core mission was to enhance productivity by enabling collaborative work on complex tasks.

Greene's extensive background in enterprise software, particularly from her time leading VMware through significant growth and its acquisition by EMC, shaped Bebop's direction. This experience provided her with deep insights into the needs of large companies, which was a critical asset Google sought to leverage. Before its acquisition, Bebop secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2015 from notable venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

In a strategic move to bolster its enterprise cloud offerings, Google acquired Bebop in November 2015 for approximately $380 million. This was widely seen as an "acqui-hire" to bring Diane Greene on board to lead Google's entire cloud business, which included Google for Work, Cloud Platform, and Google Apps. Upon the acquisition's close, the Bebop team joined Google. Greene was appointed Senior Vice President for Google's enterprise businesses and continued to serve on Google's board, a position she had held since 2012. In a noteworthy philanthropic gesture, Greene donated her entire $148.6 million portion from the sale to a donor-advised fund for charity.

Keywords: enterprise applications, cloud development platform, Diane Greene, Google acquisition, VMWare, Mendel Rosenblum, enterprise software, cloud computing, Sequoia Capital, a16z, stealth startup, application development, enterprise collaboration, Google Cloud, software development tools