Alphabet has announced who its new chief financial officer (CFO) will be, revealing today that it has hired pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company’s CFO Anat Ashkenazi.
Ashkenazi will start her new role at Google’s parent company on July 31, 2024, according to an SEC filing today, after 23 years at Eli Lilly where she served in various roles at the company until entering the CFO hotseat in 2021.
Eli Lilly confirmed that Ashkenazi had resigned, reporting that she intends to remain in position there through July, after which she intends to “pursue a career opportunity outside of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Alphabet announced current CFO Ruth Porat’s departure last July, with the company announcing that she would remain in position until they found a replacement. Porat joined Alphabet, then known as Google, from Morgan Stanley in 2015.
While Alphabet is an entirely different proposition to Eli Lilly, which is known for pharmaceuticals such as clinical depression and diabetes drugs, Eli Lilly is an $800 billion company in its own right, so the step over is not exactly Herculean. Plus, Alphabet already has existing alignments with the healthcare and life science sectors, through subsidiaries such as Verily and Calico.
It’s also worth noting that Alphabet spun out an AI-enabled drug-discovery company called Isomorphic Labs, founded by DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, which earlier this year inked a strategic deal with Eli Lilly (and Novartis) 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.
“We’re very pleased to have found such a strong CFO, with a track record of strategic focus on long-term investment to fuel innovation and growth,” said Pichai said in a statement. “The AI era is giving us an incredible opportunity to innovate at scale across our core products, and to create entirely new products and experiences for our users and customers. I look forward to working with Anat as we invest responsibly to support our next wave of growth.”
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