The London tech firm behind the Nothing Phone has borrowed £30m in a debt raise after its annual losses widened.

Nothing Technology, founded by serial smartphone entrepreneur Carl Pei, agreed the loan with Santander in late December 2024, according to documents filed with Companies House. It follows a $96m equity raise the firm completed in June 2023 in a round led by Google Ventures, EQT Ventures C Capital and music group Swedish House Mafia.

The company posted a loss of £59.4m for the year to the end of December 2023, an increase of 60% compared to the previous year, when adjusting for the relative length of the different accounting periods. Amid the scale of the losses, Nothing had just £1.4m of cash resources by year end, a decrease of 70% compared to 2022.

The smartphone maker said the loss “reflects its operation as a research and development centre, marketing centre and administrative centre…during this phase of massive growth.”

Revenue for the year rose 12.1% to just under £50m — the equivalent of around 125,000 sales of its latest smartphone, the Phone (2a) Plus, based on the latest retail prices. 8.5% of the sales derived from the UK, with 91.4% coming from the rest of Europe.

More recently, in March sales of the firm’s Nothing 2a phone surpassed 100,000 within a day of its launch, in signs the firm’s growth continues to pick up momentum.

Founded in late 2020, Nothing launched its first phone, the phone (1), in 2022. Nothing’s founder, Carl Pei, previously founded Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus in 2013. Nothing’s parent company is located in the Cayman Islands, an offshore tax haven.

Pei courted controversy in November when he described the modern smartphone as “the opium of the mind.”

He told an audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco: “Marketing the personal computer, Steve Jobs referred to it as the bicycle of the mind…being able to help us realise our goals in a much more efficient way than before.

“But the modern smartphone…is definitely not a bicycle for the mind; its more of an opium of the mind.

“Somewhere along the way the technology went wrong and I’m really excited to see whether we can leverage the new technology coming out of this era to restart or rebuild the bicycle of the mind.”

Pei also suggested that Nothing could explore developing its own operating system in the future.

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