The idea for SIP came from Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city company that Google created in 2015. Sidewalk’s flagship project was Quayside, a plan to develop a 12-acre site in Toronto to showcase various high-tech urban ideas. Building a city from scratch made sense as a way for Google’s parent company to experiment with urban innovation, said Jonathan Winer, SIP’s co-founder and co-chief executive officer.
In 2019, he and several other Sidewalk employees left to form SIP with a plan to build large, technically sophisticated projects. Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan funded the effort as its only investors. Sidewalk Labs said in 2020 it was no longer pursuing Quayside. This past December, Daniel Doctoroff, Sidewalk Lab’s CEO and the former CEO of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, stepped down for health reasons. Google said it was absorbing the company’s existing projects.
SIP is set up in an unusual way for a startup, operating sometimes as a sort of venture capital firm and other times as an operator building projects itself. This allows it to pursue a wider range of projects, Winer said.Article content Among them is a 40-mile highway between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, designed for autonomous and connected vehicles. Michigan’s state government unveiled the plan in 2020, and Winer said the first stretch of road will open this year. He’s in talks with other states about similar developments, he said. SIP has also invested $100 million a project in California that uses smart thermostats and plugs to compensate customers for reducing their energy use at times of high demand.