Magic Leap Raised $461M From Investors, Totaling $2.3B for Its Smartglasses
Magic Leap announced on March 7 2018 that it has raised $461 million from investors, the biggest investor in that group is the Saudi Arabia sovereign investment arm. This follows the announcement recently of another batch of funding that totaled $502 million with Singapore’s Temasek.
With this latest round of Series-D funding, Magic Leap now has over $2.3 billion available to develop its smartglasses that it has been working on for quite some time. These smartglasses have been shown in public, but only by Shaquille O’Neal, who has invested in the company in the past.
According to reports, Magic Leap is spending around $50 million per month right now, so the company definitely needed to raise some funds. Over at Magic Leap, there are a few allegations of employees funning contracts to those that they have personal relationships with. Which means that Magic Leap is spending a lot more money then it actually needs to be spending, which is also why it is burning through money pretty quickly. Definitely not a good look when you are a startup, and haven’t even produced a single product yet. Currently, Magic Leap has around 1400 employees, and also have offices in Florida (where it is based), as well as in Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Zurich, New Zealand and Israel.
While Magic Leap is working on smartglasses right now, that’s not the only thing the company is looking to build. It is also looking to build the “full stack”. That means it wants to build the software and content that would run on these glasses. So far, these glasses look pretty similar to a regular pair of glasses, and a bit more standard than what Google put out with Project Glass a few years ago. That will likely help it get adopted a bit more, especially in a world where many are afraid of being recorded everywhere they go. But smartglasses are a virtually untapped market, and can be useful for a number of things.