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Public story · 2026-09-12 · high
Hiring the team and licensing the tech let Google skip the merger filing a straight acquisition would have required.
Why now: Business Insider reported the deal as closed, with Mechanize's cofounder already reassigned inside DeepMind.
Google closed a deal worth more than $1.5 billion for Mechanize, an AI coding-agent startup, without filing anything with regulators. The company hired more than a dozen Mechanize staff and took a non-exclusive license to its technology instead of acquiring it outright. That structure sidesteps merger review entirely, per Business Insider.
Mechanize's cofounder and former CEO Tamay Besiroglu is now a research scientist at DeepMind, working on midtraining. Former chief of staff Guive Assadi lists himself as CEO of whatever remains. Besiroglu founded Mechanize in 2025 with Matthew Barnett and Ege Erdil to build environments, benchmarks, and training data for long-horizon agents. The startup raised $9 million in a seed round. It reached this deal in about a year.
License-plus-hire is now the standard shape for a big lab to absorb a team without a merger filing. This deal is why it keeps working. Business Insider's report doesn't say whether cofounders Matthew Barnett and Ege Erdil joined Google too, or if they're sitting this one out.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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