Brief: Singapore’s Temasek leads $502m round for Magic Leap

Photo credit: Magic Leap.

The news (extracted from Bloomberg):

• Magic Leap, the mysterious startup developing an augmented reality headset, has added US$502 million to its war chest. The funding round was led by Singapore state fund Temasek and joined in by investors like EDBI, Grupo Globo, Janus Henderson, and Alibaba.
• This brought the Florida-based startup’s total funding to over US$1.8 billion.
• Bloomberg earlier reported that the latest financing was expected to value Magic Leap at about US$6 billion.

Why it matters:

• Magic Leap hasn’t even released a product yet. It has never given a launch date for its device, nor offered much detail on how it would work.
• What’s known so far is that it’s fallen behind AR competitor Microsoft and might have oversold what it can do, according to The Information.
• That hasn’t stopped prominent benefactors – Google and Andreessen Horowitz also previously funded the company – from backing it up.