Why Did DeepMind Sell to Google?

David Senra, reading Sebastian Mallaby, says Demis Hassabis sold DeepMind to Google because he needed a backer with essentially unlimited resources, and blue-sky research was a poor fit for venture capital.

Fundraising nearly killed DeepMind. Backers promised an amount and then reneged, and the company almost ran out of money. Peter Thiel barely saw the DeepMind team and felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player who had spent formative years mentally crushing opponents. Investor talks left Demis feeling his brain was atrophying. He was describing the biggest invention ever, and they kept asking where the widget was. He had struggled to persuade Founders Fund that DeepMind would change every widget in the world. A deep-pocketed parent could end the fundraising that pulled attention away from DeepMind's research.

Larry Page's pitch was to use what Google had already created. Building a company like Google would take the best part of a career. Demis wanted to create AGI, and helping solve intelligence was the easy choice. He would go to Google, get the computers, and solve intelligence.