Activist hedge Fund TCI Fund Management, a major Google shareholder, last month called on Alphabet to drastically cut costs, writing in a letter to management that it believed Google had too many employees.

Activist hedge Fund TCI Fund Management, a major Google shareholder, last month called on Alphabet to drastically cut costs, writing in a letter to management that it believed Google had too many employees.

In 2013, Google paid $1.1 billion for Waze, its fourth-largest deal at the time. The acquisition drew scrutiny from regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, which ultimately decided not to challenge the deal.

Waze has 151 million monthly active users for its crowdsourced mapping service, which is known for maintaining detailed traffic data. In recent years, Waze has also worked to build an advertising business.

After the acquisition, Waze will operate largely independently of Google's maps division, though Google has incorporated many of Waze's popular features into its flagship product.

In 2021, Noam Bardin, the chief executive who decided to sell Waze to Google, left the company to start Twitter competitor Post. Mr. Bardin later wrote a blog post describing the challenges he faced after joining Google, including complaints about the company's hiring practices and internal bureaucracy.

"Even after being acquired by Google, all of Waze's growth came from our work, not the support of the parent company," Bardin wrote in the blog post. Looking back, we could have grown faster and been more efficient if we had stayed independent."

Christopher Phillips, a former music technology executive who led the Geo division, will now also oversee Waze. Employees at the service previously reported to Don Harrison, Google's president of global partnerships and corporate development.