Augmented reality technology developer Magic Leap closed a series D round at over $960m, featuring a host of corporate investors like Google, Alibaba, Axel Springer and Grupo Globo.
US-based augmented reality technology developer Magic Leap closed a series D round at $963m. The round was initially backed by e-commerce firm Alibaba, internet technology provider Google and media company Grupo Globo that all contributed to the round’s $502m first tranche back in October last year. The first tranche also featured Singaporean government-owned investment firm Temasek.
Magic Leap managed to add $461m to the round. $400m of them came from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The remaining $61m were committed by a host of new investors, including media group Axel Springer’s corporate venturing unit, Axel Springer Digital Ventures. This series D round reportedly valued the company at about $6bn. Before the second tranche of this round, the company had raised a total of over $1.88bn from corporate-backed rounds alone, according to GCV Analytics data.
Founded in 2011, Magic Leap develops an AR headset together with a dedicated operating system, and is in talks with prospective content producers. Magic Leap’s goggle are capable of superimposing animated computer graphics over a user’s vision of real life. Its light field technology could hypothetically be used for a variety of purposes. The company expects to commercially release the headset with a price of between $1,500 and $2,000 by the end of 2018.
This is one of the largest deals raised by the exponentially growing virtual and augmented reality space. As the historical chart below shows, both of the volume and total value of corporate-backed rounds of such enterprises has been growing substantially and multi-fold over the past four years: from $1.08bn over 43 deals in 2014 to $6.35bn over 135 reported deals last year. What is also evident from the sector breakdown is the wide-range of applications of this technology that goes much beyond entertainment.
