Google is planning to merge the Waze team, a mapping service, with the team responsible for the company’s mapping products to streamline operations and ease growing cost pressures, the company said.
Google plans to merge its 500-strong Waze team with the company’s Geo division, which is responsible for Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View products, starting Friday, according to a Google spokesperson.
Waze CEO Neha Parikh will leave after a transition period. A Google spokesman said the company plans to keep Waze as a standalone service and does not plan to make any layoffs as part of the restructuring.
Google said it expects the restructuring to reduce overlap between the Waze and Maps product teams. In a statement, a Google spokesperson said, “Google remains committed to building Waze’s unique brand, continuing to persist in improving the beloved app, and supporting a thriving community of volunteers and users.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is always looking for ways to improve efficiency after advertising growth has slowed this year. In September, Pichai said he wanted Google to be 20 percent more efficient and suggested the company might merge teams developing overlapping products.
Google’s major shareholder, activist hedge fund TCI Fund Management, called on Alphabet last month to make big cost cuts, writing in a letter to management that it believes Google has too many employees.
In 2013, Google bought Waze for $1.1 billion, the fourth-largest deal the company made at the time. The acquisition drew scrutiny from regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which ultimately decided not to challenge the deal.
Waze’s crowdsourced mapping service, which has 151 million active monthly users, is known for maintaining detailed traffic data. In recent years, Waze has also worked to build up its advertising business.
After the acquisition, Waze operated largely independently of the Google Maps division, although Google integrated many of Waze’s popular features into its flagship product.
In 2021, Noam Bardin, the CEO who decided to sell Waze to Google, left the company to start Post, a Twitter competitor, and Bardin later wrote a blog post describing the challenges he faced after joining Google, including dissatisfaction with the company’s hiring practices and internal bureaucracy.
In the blog post, Balding wrote, “Even after being acquired by Google, all of Waze’s growth has come from our own work, not the support of our parent company. Looking back, we probably would have grown faster and been more efficient if we had stayed independent.”
Former music technology executive Christopher Phillips, who led the Geo division, will now also oversee Waze. the service’s staff previously reported to Don Harrison, Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development.
