Storied AR headset unicorn Magic Leap has laid off its entire sales and marketing departments, making for around 75 jobs cut from its rolls.

Initially the focus of a Bloomberg report, Magic Leap has now confirmed the layoff round, stating the move was to adjust its strategy moving forward:

“Magic Leap has been evolving our go-to-market approach to better align with market dynamics and emerging opportunities, optimizing how we support our customers and our ecosystem,” Magic Leap told Bloomberg. “As part of this, we have consolidated our frontline engagement to our developer support and care teams. We will continue to actively support Magic Leap’s customers, developers and our large ecosystem through the Developer Support and Care teams.”

Citing two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports Magic Leap has been struggling in recent months, as the company allegedly told employees earlier this year it would pivot from selling AR headsets to enterprise, and instead move to license its AR optics tech.

Magic Leap 2 | Photo by Road to VR

While no such plans have been made public, one of the insiders told Bloomberg it represented “a last-ditch effort” by leadership to salvage its remaining value. The other insider maintains laid-off employees will receive two months of severance pay, stating the layoff came “out of left field” despite the company’s recent struggles.

Founded in 2010, the Plantation, Florida-based company initially had high hopes it could pitch Magic Leap 1, its first headset released in 2018, to both consumers and enterprise. Priced at $2,300, the AR headset had difficulty gaining traction, forcing Magic Leap to pivot and drop its consumer-focused ambitions in mid-2020 amid the departure of CEO and co-founder Rony Abovitz. The company released Magic Leap 2 in late 2020 solely targeted at enterprise.

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The company has amassed nearly $4.5 billion in funds to date, which included early investments from Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, and AT&T. In late 2022, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund became majority stakeholder after injecting $450 million into the company. That country’s investment fund further pumped in an additional $590 million in January 2024.

More recently, Google announced earlier this summer it was forming a “strategic technology partnership” with Magic Leap, the details of which still aren’t well understood.

Considering Magic Leap’s recent layoff and further claims of potential optics licensing, it could potentially mean Google is looking to leverage some of Magic Leap’s waveguide tech in future AR hardware.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Ivan

    That's unfortunate to hear. I thought after the restructuring after Abovitz left, after the HoloLens 2 team was dismembered, and after Apple and Meta showed interest in AR that Magic Leap would have gotten the boost they needed to stay in the race.

    I'm surprised that Vuzix is still around after Meta (the original "Meta" AR headset company, lead Meron Gribetz), HoloLens, and Magic Leap, Daqri, and others, had to give up on their optical see-through and industry focused headsets.

    Too bad there aren't that many industry focused headsets available with good support and camera/sensor access left. Hopefully HTC Vive (Vive Focus product line), Meta, Apple, Google/Samsung, and other companies can fill in the gap of industry focused headsets and also consumer focused ones as well.

    With Apple's AVP now offering camera access for industry applications and Meta recently releasing the Ocean C++ Framework For Computer Vision (CV) And Augmented Reality (AR) Applications, which is compatible with the Quest (even if through an external camera), maybe these companies will soon start to fill in this gap and we see a leap in AR products and applications.

    • Guest

      It's a glaring double standard, really. Meta already collects more information than anyone could possibly fathom. They really hold nothing back, "Privacy Policy" be damned. It's so convoluted and hostile so nobody can ever truly understand it. But they won't give access to anyone but themselves because of liability, even though they themselves are, evidenced by the constant and non stop privacy scandals.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I want camera access for AR/CV, even limited to dev builds/requesting user approval. But inside-out tracking 360° scanning the environment non-stop can be a huge privacy risk, recording users, kids, unaware co-workers or very personal items. Way worse than the webcams or smart assistants many are paranoid about.

        Getting people to try VR/XR is hard, and Meta already has a bad reputation regarding privacy, so they'll avoid anything that'd make them the next "glassholes". The Quest Pro "Build with privacy in mind" page explains that eye/face tracking data is deleted immediately after processing and how and which data is handled. They have long, opaque EULA's, but emphasize that tracking images never leave their headsets.

        I actually believe them, as messing this up could ruin their whole XR plans for limited gain. With no OS being perfectly safe, Meta's best bet is to assure users there is no way for even Meta to get camera images from the OS, which malicious developers or governments could exploit or social engineer around. Unfortunately that makes interesting AR/XR uses impossible/harder by requiring external cameras.

        Meta started collecting "risky" anonymous HMD usage data in early 2024, and eventually will have to grant camera access. But I understand why they are going slow, allowing people to first get used to HMDs with cameras, just like we got used to ubiquitous smartphones and the permanent risk of appearing on YouTube with realizing it.

        • XRC

          During my AVP demo in London yesterday morning, Apple advised several times they would respect my privacy whether scanning my face with their iPhone for the demo build, whilst using the device or the personal information generated by my session.

    • Nevets

      so they'll avoid anything that could make them the next "glassholes".

      You've seen their RayBans, surely? '

  • Octogod

    $4,500,000,000 well spent.

    • The iPhone makes Apple a multitrillion dollar company.
      So naturally everyone wants to be in on the ground floor for the Next Big Thing.
      They mistakenly believe it's AIO AR,
      so they throw a bunch o' cash at it.
      Fuckin' dummies. lol
      And why tf is Abovitz not in fucking prison …..?
      []^ (

  • STL

    I'm always amused hearing about investors giving billions of money to a technology development a small team of highly paid experts can do extremely well for 10% of that price.

  • kool

    Id take a magic leap scope it could have nv, heat, sight adjustments, digital zoom, digital spotter and digital laser. Or a bike helmet anything outside would be cool!

  • dogtato

    you say "storied" i say "overhyped and doomed from the start"

    was obvious to me in 2015 that investors were throwing money away. doesn't matter that its AR vs VR when the market for either is so niche and they're wanting to recoup billions of investment. doesn't matter if the hardware is good if there is no market for something that costs more than a desktop computer and does less. i can't believe anyone thought it would be a success

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL:DR: anyone claiming they knew in advance, correctly predicting the future, but not rich from investing according to that knowledge, has fallen for their own bullshit. While the most valuable companies in the world regularly lose billions because tech doesn't work out, but know that this is just part of the cost of doing high tech business.

      Investments into high tech startups aren't made for the current or near term market, but for an expected future market. Meta's total investment into XR since the early 2010s is expected to now be close to USD 100bn, Apple is believed to have invested at least a two figure billons sum into AVP, of which they can't even build more than 450K this year due to display supply constraints. Meta has sold around 25mn HMDs with around 10mn currently active users. So Meta "invested" USD 10K per active user or USD 2.5K per sold HMD, with the Quest 2 mostly offered at USD 300 the most popular. Apple, always making things a bit more expensive, invested over USD 22K per USD 3500 AVP available in the first year.

      Of course such calculations are nonsense, as neither of the companies would bother if they didn't expect that market to at one time become very huge, allowing them to recoup their money. And both also heavily invested into see-through AR very early on, but recently postponed these projects because the tech proves to be a lot harder than pretty much anybody expected. They have therefore switched to passthrough as an intermediate tech, which can be "good enough" for everyday use, but it will be pretty much impossible to get it to a point where it doesn't cause a significant reduction compared to what our eyes can do.

      So we still will need to get see-through AR to work, just like a decade ago. Magic Leap was one of the first to successfully produce something working in an area big companies still expect to one day replace smartphones, which are a gigantic market. So Google and others pumping billions into Magic Leap was a daring, but not an insane bet.

      Bets sometimes don't work out. A lot of Meta's USD 100bn will be "lost bets", but they could switch to other technologies like passthrough as a temporary fallback, something Magic Leap can't. So I'm calling bullshit on anyone claiming that it was "obvious" in 2015 that Magic Leap would fail. There was a significant chance of failure, but that's business as usual for venture capital, where 7/10 new companies just fold, 2/10 turn into "zombies" (making enough money to survive, sufficient for a regular business, but not enough for VCs), while one becomes so successful that it will pay for the other nine too. That of course only a rough rule of thumb, VCs vary wildly in strategy and success.

      Unless someone can show me how they became stinking rich by shortening the stock of (several) companies they "knew" were going to fail, it is just another case of hindsight being 20/20. And I can pretty much guarantee you that many of the investors that lost billions with Magic Leap will in fact invest again into see-through XR in the future. If you look some of the earlier Oculus Connect videos, you'll find that the predicted technological process was way too optimistic, with a lot of it taking a lot more time. And Meta had and has some of the most knowledgable XR researchers on the planet actually working on that tech, so those weren't just predictions from some random person that a decade later would claim to have known all along.

      • XRC

        Got to spend an hour using the first Magic Leap headset, couple years ago.

        Very impressive hardware and some great software which truly demonstrated the potential. Came away pleasantly surprised, similar to my time with Hololens. But didn't expect either device to sell in any quantity, it was a glimpse of a possible future.

  • xyzs

    If only this money was spent into 50 competitive true startups instead of this huge scam… With multiple dozen of million per startup, that would have laid some amazing advancements.
    Instead, here is nothing.

  • Nevets

    Sorry but they just need to die. They haven't met their original promises since Rony was at the helm in 2013.