Google acquires wearable technology and part of Fossil’s R&D team

Google pays Fossil Group $40 million to acquire intellectual property in smartwatch technology. Part of Fossil’s R&D team will also work at Google.

It is not clear which techniques are involved. Fossil Group’s strategic chief Greg McKelvey said in the announcement that his company “has created technology that has the potential to improve our existing smartwatch platform.” For her part, Stacey Burr of Google’s Wear OS team reports that “Wearables built for health, simplicity, personalization and assistance have the potential to improve lives by quickly providing users with the information and insights they need.”

Nor is it known how many employees of Fossil’s research and development team are transferring to Google. The team has a total of 200 employees. Fossil is an American company that was founded in 1984 and mainly earns from watches. In the third quarter of last year, the company had revenues of $609 million and a profit of $9.8 million.

The takeover is reminiscent of that of HTC staff. Google used that knowledge and people to develop its own Pixel smartphones. Whether the current acquisition means that Google is working on its own smartwatch is not clear. There have been rumors for some time about the arrival of its own smartwatch from Google. The company denied last year that such a wearable would come that year.