(Bloomberg) — DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., saw its revenue almost double last year, but gains were dwarfed by losses that increased to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The London-based company also has more than a billion dollars of debt due for repayment this year, according to full-year accounts for the year ended Dec. 31 posted to U.K. business registry Companies House.
Losses for 2018 widened to 470.2 million pounds ($572 million) from 302.2 million pounds in 2017. Revenue rose to 102.8 million pounds, up from 54.4 million pounds. Staff costs also nearly doubled against the year-ago period to 398 million pounds in 2018.
A debt of 1.04 billion pounds due this year includes an 883 million-pound loan from its owner. DeepMind had written assurances it would be financially supported for at least another year.
A spokeswoman for the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alphabet Inc. bought DeepMind for 400 million pounds in 2014. The next year, the company began working on health-care research, eventually creating an entire division dedicated to the area.
The company works with the U.K. National Health Service hospitals, researching algorithms that can diagnose eye diseases and spot head and neck cancers from medical imagery, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on an algorithm that can predict which patients are at risk of sudden deterioration from acute kidney injury and other conditions.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nate Lanxon in London at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at [email protected], Adveith Nair
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