Magic Leap still hasn’t released a product, but they’re continuing to raise a lot of cash to get there. The Plantation, Florida-based augmented reality startup announced today that it has raised $461 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment arm, The Public Investment Fund. The Saudi Arabian fund contributed $400 million of the raise, with “new investors” fronting the rest, the company said.
The additional Series D funding comes after Magic Leap confirmed a $502 million funding round led by Temasek in October. The total Series D funding now stands at $963 million, the company says.
Magic Leap has raised more than $2.3 billion in funding to date.
“The Magic Leap team and I are happy to welcome The Public Investment Fund and the other new investors to the Magic Leap family. We look forward to having them join us on our journey to build an amazing future,” CEO Rony Abovitz said in a statement.
Okay, now, why the heck does Magic Leap need so much money? Well, that’s a question people have been asking for quite a while, but the gist boils down to the fact that they’re trying to do it all.
A lot of the hardware they’ve been trying to create hasn’t been built before, so they’ve focused a lot of resources on looking to develop new display technologies and develop sensor suites that can map environments quickly and efficiently. They’re also building their own operating system and courting developers to build specifically for their platform, a system that will have few parallels and require some unique thinking on the part of those building for it.
The approach to mastering it all at the same time has meant a lot of delays for the startup, but the constant stream of high-profile investors have also given Magic Leap easy access to capital as they’ve continued to raise and raise without having shipped a single headset. The company’s Magic Leap One “Creator Edition” is supposedly going to see a 2018 release, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions that the company has yet to publicly acknowledge.
