Magic Leap, which is working on virtual reality has been funded by the online retailer to expand to China
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.is backing an American company. The Florida based tech startup Magic Leap which is making efforts to develop a new type of augmented reality, announced yesterday that it has received $793 million in a financing round led by the Chinese e-commerce company. A number of other companies have also invested in the organization including organizations like Morgan Stanley, J.P Morgan and Fidelity.
Investors like Qualcomm and Google have also invested heavily. CEO of Magic Leap Rony Abovitz has referred to their investment as “strong and deep reinvestments" in the organization. During David Liosky’s call, he could not help but question Rony: Why have you made an announcement in the current situation where the company that have touted for rising up the unicorn leaderboard turned themselves to a larger target?
"We do have certain Delaware filings to update and people will and have go through them and write the wrong things, just a bunch of speculation. We don't want a bunch of misinformation flying around. If there was a way to raise this kind of capital and not talk about it in any way, that would have been nice. As a company, we're heads down and want our first product to speak for us."
Rony was particularly excited to make an addition of Alibaba as a partner as he believes that the partnership with the online retailer would help Magic Leap enter the Chinese market. The financing announcement is also representing Rony’s debut and new name of the technology pioneered by Magic Leap: "Mixed Reality Lightfield." Rony has explained, in a coy manner, why he had a feeling that the organization needed to break the virtual reality- Augmented reality box that the enterprise was regularly putting in.
So how will $793.5million help the startup bring regarding the new reality. Rony has quickly noted that most of the $542 million received by the enterprise haven’t been disbursed.
Those funds have earmarked to move the US company from its technology phase to the phase for the development of the product and then to the pilot phase and towards a commercial launch.
Bloomberg reported that after being funded by the Online trading giant, Magic Leap is being valued at $4.5bn.The American company has promised to develop a handset equipped with the capacity to utilize a light field technology’s type to stimulate three dimensional images super imposed in reality.
CB Insights data has revealed that since 2013, Hangzhou based company has made an investment in around 5 American start ups. Chairman and founder of Alibaba Jack Ma stated in 2015 Alibaba would help finance tech startups based in US with plans for letting them extend to China.
Co- vice chairman of Alibaba, Joe Tsai will join the board of Magic Leap, which include CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, Rony stated.
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