Welcome to the maiden voyage of our new Market Reality column. Each Friday, NextReality will give you a roundup of news briefs from the financial end of the augmented and mixed reality industry. We'll cover funding news, market analysis, and more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit everyone hard. With over 36 million American workers filing unemployment claims, finances are at the front of everyone's mind. Understanding your accounts has never been as important.
When it comes to making smartglasses that look more like regular eyeglasses and less like sci-fi helmets, Corning International might be among the suppliers to make it happen.
Australia is looking to the future and finding driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles to be a top priority. Spacial Source reports that the state government has put AU$10 million into their Future Mobility Land Fund "to drive local development of autonomous vehicle technology."
The venture arms of Samsung and Verizon Ventures, along with Comcast, are among the strategic investors backing startup Light Field Lab and its glasses-free holographic displays in a $28 million Series A funding round
Update: Monday, 11 p.m. ET: In a report from Bloomberg, eMagin CEO Jeffrey Lucas has contradicted what appeared to be investor information found in SEC filings that surfaced on Monday. Although Apple is listed among several other investors in the company in filing, Lucas told Bloomberg that Apple is not, in fact, an investor in the company. Offering further clarification, Lucas told the news site that eMagin "listed those companies in the filing because it had discussions with them at industr...
Investors continue to bet on augmented reality, both for short-term returns and long-term plays. This week, Niantic reportedly picked up another round of funding from Samsung and others, based on the success of PokémonGO and the prospects for future revenue. Likewise, investors see value in WaveOptics, whose waveguide displays could make consumer smaller AR smartglasses possible within the next year.
On Tuesday, Blue Vision Labs, one of three Google-backed companies working on AR Cloud platforms, announced its acquisition by ride-sharing company Lyft.
Influenced by the growth of augmented and virtual reality technology as well as 3D computer vision, Ericcson Ventures invested in Matterport, whose hardware and software help companies create AR/VR experiences.
The leading platforms enabling augmented reality technology lead our headlines in Market Reality this week.
Google's former driverless car boss Chris Urmson raised considerable funds to get his new startup company Aurora Innovation up and running. Axios initially reported that Urmson raised over $3 million to fund his brainchild in the wake of his Alphabet exit, according to an SEC filing.
This week, inside sources divulged details of how Apple nearly acquired Leap Motion, twice. Otherwise, companies offering or working on augmented reality technology had more successes than failures to talk about.
As with any investment, putting your money in foreign markets requires due diligence and the willingness to take risks.
While the rest of the world is scrambling to figure out how to adopt augmented reality and VR tools for remote meetings, one company is building its war chest to serve the growing space of corporate clients who need this kind of immersive computing training.
Investment in augmented reality remained robust in 2019. For the third consecutive year, we looked back on the biggest funding deals in the AR industry this week, and a familiar name came out on top.
Despite the recent gut punch of staff layoffs, Canada-based smartglasses startup North and its Focals are likely to be in the game for a while longer.
After a $20 million funding round fell through, augmented reality headset maker Meta Company has been forced to furlough (or place on temporary leave of absence) approximately 65% of its workforce for 30 days.
Apple's TrueDepth camera made its debut in the premium-priced iPhone X late last year, and since then, the reviews have been pretty positive. Now, Apple might be preparing to make the Animoji-friendly sensors available in more iPhones, as well as the iPad Pro, later this year.
As expected, Magic Leap closed a Series D round of equity funding, raising $502 million from new and existing investors. Less expected, however, were a fresh set of rumors that the company's first devices could ship within six months.
What began as a highly successful Kickstarter campaign has all but ended, according to an updated report by Polygon. CastAR, comprised of a few people from Valve's former research and hacking arm, has released a large portion of their team. Only a small core of the group remains, trying to sell the technology they have created.
Upskill, an enterprise software developer for industrial augmented reality applications, recently received an influx of funding and a major vote of confidence from two of their top customers.
As we slowly approach its January 3 start date, CES 2017 seems to be shaping up to be an exciting year for smart glasses as well as augmented and mixed reality.
While the company is adamant that the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition will ship this year, currently, it seems its CEO is more interested in striking deals with content partners than releasing details about the headset.
Another contestant has emerged in the race to deliver a mainstream augmented reality car navigation system, with Silicon Valley-based Phiar picking up $3 million in seed funding to launch its own artificial intelligence-based mobile app by mid-2019.
Automotive augmented reality company WayRay has set its destination for a $1 billion valuation with an estimated time of arrival of 2019, and it has just passed a major milestone towards that goal.
Modern "mad men" are buying into augmented reality for marketing, with the two latest examples being trendy burger maker Bareburger and department store chain Zara.
DigiLens, a company specializing in optical waveguide technology, recently announced that they had closed a $22 million round of strategic investment, also known as Series B funding. This round brought in Sony, Foxconn, Continental, and Panasonic, as well as more traditional venture investors such as Alsop Louie Partners, Bold Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Dolby Family Ventures.
The video shows you how to calculate capital budgeting with a Texas Instruments BA2+ financial calculator. Capital budgeting will help you determine cash flows for given investments for a certain number of years in the future, thus helping you determine if the investment is worthwhile. The buttons you will use are the CF (cashflows) button, the NPV (net present value) button, and the IRR (internal rate of return) button. The video uses the example of a $10,000 investment that will return $5,0...
The rumors have been circulating for months, but now there's a source attached to the notion that Magic Leap is looking to sell itself off after a rough couple of years following the launch of its Magic Leap 1 augmented reality device.
It looks like Jaunt's pivot from VR to volumetric captures services for augmented reality experiences has paid off.
The augmented reality industry has a bright future built on innovation and growth, but that doesn't mean we can't look back at the close of the year to see what the industry has accomplished from a business perspective.
People say that money makes the world go 'round. And it's no different in the world of augmented reality.
On Monday, German newspaper and digital publisher Axel Springer announced its role as the latest company to invest in Magic Leap. This is just the latest in a series of investments the augmented reality company has garnered from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, Legendary Entertainment, Warner Bros., and others amounting to almost $2 billion in overall funding.
Verizon could be getting in on the autonomous vehicle party, judging by its recent investment in driverless software company Renovo Motors.
In December of last year, UK-based Zappar successfully raise $84,356 for their ZapBox mixed reality headset—over $50,000 more than their goal. Well, they just blew that sum out of the water when they announced this morning that they've closed a Series A round of funding with $3.75 million.
Augmented reality optics maker WaveOptics has just infused its operations with a fresh round of funding to facilitate its objective of bringing consumer-grade smartglasses at a $600 price point to market in 2019.
For a company who hasn't released a product and has a reputation for being secretive, Magic Leap sure has a tendency to make waves. Over the past few weeks, they've refreshed their website design, released an abstract YouTube video, and announced a partnership with Madefire to offer mixed reality comics on its device whenever it launches. Next, they are gearing up for another round of funding.
If competition in the augmented reality space was a spectator sport, then ARKit, ARCore, and HoloLens dominate the prime-time broadcasts on ESPN.
Economists have long since known that people want to be rewarded for taking on risk. Investments are thus judged by their risk-adjusted returns (Sharpe ratios). A typical hedge fund has a Sharpe ratio of around 0.5. This means that its excess annual return over the risk-free rate is about half its annual standard deviation.
Unclaimed money, or money that has gotten lost in the financial system but is owed to you, is all over America. If you think there might be money that belongs to you in the state of New York, check out this video made by State Comptroller Mike DiNapoli outlining how to check whether you are owed unclaimed money and how to claim it.
