Magic Leap is a multi-billion dollar AR startup company. They are the makers of the Magic Leap 1, a high-end consumer-focused AR headset. The latest news coming from their headquarters? They could be possibly looking for a buyer in the coming weeks and months.
The AR company has raised roughly $2.6 billion since the first round of funding back in 2014. With cash infusions from companies as big as Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Qualcomm, and others, they seemed to be in great position to take over the consumer AR world.
It didn’t pan out though. The deep pockets led to the company making an AR headset that seemed to be in the wrong side of the consumers world. It is too expensive for consumers that want a simple AR display, and it isn’t advanced enough for high-end enterprise users to find use with it in their every day office use-cases. The Magic Leap 1 simply flopped.
Bloomberg has the company has set its own value at “more than $10 billion if it pursues a sale,” a spokesman said. The company has reportedly contacted an adviser to consider strategic options for their options going forward.
When in doubt, what’s the best way to get the attention of a CEO? Call them out on Twitter, of course. Check out this cryptic exchange from the Magic Leap CEO below.
With that tweet being public, Abovitz isn’t shying away about promoting his upcoming Magic Leap 2. He states that it is nearing a release in 2020 with select partners and then a more wide release in the early months of 2021. If that wasn’t enough to make you think he’s in this for the long haul, he went as far as to say that the company is working on the Magic Leap 3, and is currently in the R&D phase of development.
This is not a strategy that you see often. You don’t hear Samsung talking about their upcoming phones in two years. Large companies want to focus on the current generation of hardware. Was this a calculated response and announcement? Probably not, but it likely won’t hurt the company in the long run.
Facebook has had meetings with the company, but multiple reports say there was no traction in any of them.
The only headset from the company on the market right now was, for the most part, a huge disappointment. From the concept video released in 2015 to what the product actually became, there is a large difference. Even if you visit the company website today you are going to find that they are advertising something that isn’t entirely possible. And its no knock on them. No company has figured it out yet, but not one of those companies made promises like Magic Leap has.
With that being said, the company itself has proven their worth. They took a large amount of cash and tuned it into a functioning headset with its own operating system, SDK’s, and anything else it needed to get into the hands of consumers and developers.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months. For more updates on Magic Leap and the VR industry, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
