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Magic Leap CEO and founder Rony Abovitz. Photo by BloombergDented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger tech companies enter the market.
As Magic Leap neared the release of its first augmented reality headset in August 2018, the company’s founder and CEO Rony Abovitz had a bullish target, telling investors and colleagues in meetings that he wanted to sell at least one million units within the product’s first year, according to four people who repeatedly heard the goal from Abovitz.
Eventually, Magic Leap executives convinced Abovitz—an entrepreneur known for his bold predictions about how the company’s products will disrupt computing—to settle on a more modest plan of selling at least 100,000 headsets in the first year, eventually scaling up to millions of units with future iterations, according to three people with direct knowledge of the discussions.