I've heard rumors to this effect for months, but when The Information reports on it, you can pretty much take it to the bank -- even if it's not much of a deposit:
Magic Leap managed to sell just 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset in its first six months on sale, a figure made worse by CEO Rony Abovitz’s internal claims that he wanted the startup to sell at least one million units of the device in the first year, a goal the report states he was later convinced to rethink — Abovitz later projected the company would sell 100,000 units in the first year... The company has now raised around $2.6 billion in venture funding from firms like Google, Alibaba and a slew of other investors.
To put that 6,000 in perspective, Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt 5 Kickstarter recently sold over 6,000 Augmented Reality HMDs in 30 days.
Obviously that's not a completely fair comparison, since Magic Leap's headset is selling for $2,300, as opposed to Tilt 5's $299 entry level price. Then again, you can also say the comparison is unfair in the other direction, since Jeri and her team made these sales as a bootstrapped startup working with a tiny six figure budget, versus Magic Leap working with $2.6 billion dollars from some of the world's top tech companies.
In any case, the repercussions in both directions should be pretty significant:
For AR/VR startups, expect to see even further tightening of venture funding, since Magic Leap's failure looms so large. But for Tilt 5, expect to see even more interest in the indie AR platform which has succeeded where the giants have failed.
I read this on friday and immediate thought was 'gosh. has that been released then?' I think it had become so buried in the level of vapourware that it passed below any conscious level - I even had to look up what it even was.
And then promptly forgot until you mentioned it again.
Dunno, there must be some serious magic pixie dust that is being sprinkled around by ser Abovitz there.
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Monday, December 09, 2019 at 01:22 PM