Magic Leap has had one hell of a journey, and to their credit, it seems investors are still addicted to giving them money.
The augmented reality startup announced today that they have raised $500 million at a $2 billion valuation from existing investors. The round echoes the terms of an October 2014 raise where Magic Leap raised $542 million at a reported $2 billion valuation. Quite a bit has happened in the meantime.
Curiously, Magic Leap decided not to actually disclose any of the specific investors participating in this latest fundraise. At this point, the company has raised $3.5 billion in total funding according to Crunchbase, meaning that most of the investors they’ve brought in haven’t fared too well thus far.
The latest valuation is a far cry from the company’s $6.7 billion valuation they reached in 2019, but for a startup that nearly shut down last year, it could be a lot worse. Magic Leap fired a healthy chunk of its staff and was forced to raise hundreds of millions at slashed valuation terms last year. The startup also replaced its founder Rony Abovitz with former Microsoft VP Peggy Johnson as CEO.
The company has been trying to turn things around by revamping its messaging with a focus wholly on enterprise audiences after years of trying to compete with Microsoft for military contracts (and failing) and trying to compete with Microsoft for enterprise clients (with some success), all while attempting to also stay on consumer radars by bankrolling expensive games for their very expensive headset.
Alongside news of this new round, we also got a new rendering, via CNBC, of the startup’s next AR glasses product. The device seems to have gotten a much smaller device footprint, but Magic Leap didn’t have too much to say on the device’s new capabilities. In a press release, Magic Leap says that it will roll out the new hardware, called the Magic Leap 2, sometime next year.
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