This week, AR headset vendor Magic Leap secured roughly $590 million via Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, following the region becoming the firm’s majority owner in 2022. The Saudi Arabia funding has launched Magic Leap’s valuation to more than $4.5 billion, providing the firm with a solid foundation to continue its journey of delivering enterprise-grade XR solutions.
The funding will assist Magic Leap in developing its headset portfolio to rival Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset and The Meta Quest 3, namely for enterprise clients.
The XR headset market is poised to gain significant attention when Apple drops its product next month. The XR industry is already widely adopting spatial computing as a trending tech term, with many new headset providers jumping into the pool.
Magic Leap has recently undergone a significant leadership change, and with the fresh capital, the firm may enter 2024 with a newfound momentum.
Magic Leap Appoints New CEO
Last October, Magic Leap announced that Ross Rosenberg would take over as CEO of the company, with Peggy Johnson stepping down from the position. Rosenberg officially assumed his role on November 1, 2023.
With the shakeup, Magic Leap plans to shift its focus to the enterprise market and transform its business to support enterprise adoption of its AR platform technologies. According to the company, Rosenberg’s extensive experience in operations, strategy, and marketing makes him an ideal candidate to lead this transformation.
Rosenberg has a long track record of executing “transformational growth strategies in enterprise and industrial technologies,” having worked with companies such as Bain Capital, First Solar, Danaher, and Belden.
Rosenberg said in a recent statement,
As companies begin to see true ROI from deploying AR technologies, there is now a clear need state that Magic Leap is capable of solving for. I am incredibly excited to begin working with the world class team at Magic Leap and want to thank Peggy for her leadership in guiding the company through a critical phase of its development.
In August 2020, Johnson took on the role of chief executive, and during her tenure, the company rebranded and shifted its focus to cater to enterprise clients. Magic Leap targeted various industry verticals such as healthcare, design, manufacturing, and collaboration. Under Johnson’s leadership, the company successfully launched Magic Leap 2, which received critical acclaim in the XR world.
Commenting on her departure, she said,
Having accomplished so much of what I set out to do at Magic Leap, I felt the time had come to transition leadership to a new CEO who can guide the company through its next period of growth. I’m incredibly proud of the leadership team we’ve built at Magic Leap and want to sincerely thank all of the employees for their work in helping to successfully reorient the company to the enterprise market.
Apple Vision Pro due Next Month
The news comes as Apple plans to drop its bombshell of a headset next month, which is making major XR headset vendors take note.
Apple has confirmed that the MR headset will be released on February 2. Pre-orders will be open from January 19. The device will be distributed in all US stores and for US online customers only, with availability in other regions to follow.
Apple will start the pricing of the Vision Pro at $3,499 for a model with 256GB of storage. The device boasts a high-resolution, 23 million-pixel display across two micro-OLED lenses, a 2-hour battery life, an immersive camera for capturing spatial audio/photos/video for peer-to-peer sharing, iPhone/iPad/Mac synchronization, a light seal, a LiDAR scanner, and a TrueDepth camera. The Vision Pro also runs on a custom operating system, VisionOS, which Apple designed explicitly for MR applications.
