Magic Leap Cuts 75 Jobs, Shifts Focus to Technology Licensing

Augmented reality (AR) startup Magic Leap reportedly cut 75 jobs on Thursday (July 18) as it reorients its business toward technology licensing.

The company’s cuts included its entire sales and marketing departments, Bloomberg reported Friday (July 19).

“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,” a company spokesperson said in the report. “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,” the spokesperson said.

Since its founding in 2010, Magic Leap has shifted its focus from building an AR headset for consumers, to focusing primarily on business users, to concentrating on technology licensing, according to the report.

The company now aims to license its optics technology used in AR headsets, the report said.

This report comes about two months after Google formed a partnership with Magic Leap.

The companies offered few details about their collaboration, but Reuters reported on May 30 that the partnership is a sign that Google could be planning a return to the market for augmented and virtual reality technology.

The partnership would meld Magic Leap’s optics and device manufacturing expertise with Google’s technology platforms, though neither company said whether the partnership is expected to produce a consumer AR device.

“We’ve shipped a couple of different versions of augmented reality devices so far, so we’re out there delivering things, and Google has a long history of platforms thinking,” Magic Leap Chief Technology Officer Julie Larson-Green told Reuters at the time. “So, we’re thinking, putting our expertise and their expertise together, there’s lots of things we could end up doing.”

In October, Magic Leap appointed Ross Rosenberg as CEO, saying he will drive the next phase of the company’s growth at a time when the enterprise AR market is beginning to merge around specific use cases and verticals.

“As companies begin to see the true [return on investment (ROI)] from deploying AR technologies, there is now a clear need state that Magic Leap is capable of solving for,” Rosenberg said at the time in a press release.