Thursday, December 10, 2015

AR Startup Magic Leap Raises $827M on Valuation of $3.7B

WSJ, Forbes, The Verge: Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap could raise up to $827 million in a new funding round. This would bring Magic Leap’s total funding to about $1.4 billion. If Magic Leap raises the full amount, it could be valued at about $3.7 billion, according to venture-capital data firm VC Experts. The previous investments came from Google, Qualcomm Ventures, KKR, Vulcan Capital, KPCB, Andreesen Horowtiz, Obvious Ventures and others.

“We’re fundamentally a new kind of lightfield chip to enable new experiences,” said Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz at a conference in June. “There’s no off-the-shelf stuff used. That’s the reason for the amount of capital we’ve raised — to go to the moon.” Abovitz also released Magic Leap’s SDK and said the company was building 260,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in Florida to develop components for the device.
Posted by Vladimir Koifman at 19:00

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 11, 2015 at 3:20 AM

    Magic Leap will go down as one of the biggest cons in tech history.

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  2. AnonymousDecember 11, 2015 at 6:23 AM

    I thought it was 1 billion :)

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  3. AnonymousDecember 11, 2015 at 12:35 PM

    I cannot understand somebody with no sales and no proven market traction raise this type of money. A lot of stupid money chasing dreams.

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    Replies
    1. AnonymousDecember 11, 2015 at 11:42 PM

      I'd be careful with jumping to such conclusions. This is not a disposable amount for anyone. Investors who put in such amounts must have done some serious DD and must have seen more of the ML technology than most of us here. There is a good chance that they are not complete idiots and there might be something in there capable of surprising us. I have heard some impressed comments from people who are not dummies. It is a surprising amount of money (and they seem to be giving equity away very rapidly), but let's see some results before we conclude.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousDecember 16, 2015 at 1:33 PM

      I think the risk is pretty high, but there is definitely something there. The only other company to do something comparable is Microsoft (maybe better; we don't know) with their Hololens. I am sure Microsoft probably spent and plans to spend more than what ML is getting.

      Delete
  4. AnonymousDecember 11, 2015 at 5:53 PM

    I think the dream is mainly from the gaming industry.

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