Nest is rejoining Google after spending a little over two years as a separate company under its parent company’s umbrella.
Google senior vice president of hardware Rick Osterloh said Wednesday in a blog post that Nest would become part of Google’s hardware team, which includes the search giant’s lineup of devices like the Pixel phone and Internet-connected Google Home speaker.
Nest was co-founded by former Apple executive Tony Fadell in 2010 and pitched itself as a maker of sophisticated Internet-connected thermostats that could do feats like automatically change room temperatures by picking up on people’s habits.
Google (GOOG) eventually bought Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion, and then made it a separate company after it formed the Alphabet holding company in 2015.
In spring 2016, several reports said that Nest was having problems debuting new products and that employees seemed unhappy. Fadell would eventually leave the company later that year, and Google was reported to have moved an unspecified number of Nest developers to its own unit.
In an interview with CNET, Osterloh and Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz pitched the decision to move Nest to Google as the right decision because it makes it easier to build new Nest products that use Google’s artificial intelligence technologies.
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“All of Google’s investments in machine learning and AI, they can very clearly benefit Nest products. It just makes sense to be developing them together,” Osterloh told CNET.
In September, Nest debuted new products including a security camera that can notify homeowners through a smartphone app whether someone is approaching their doors.
