The Transport Guy: This startup must be working on something truly mind-blowing

Steve Kovach February 02, 2016 at 11:47AM

Magic Leap, a top-secret startup based in Orlando, Florida, has to be up to something huge.

On Tuesday, the company announced it raised another $793 million in a round led by the Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba, bringing its total funding to $1.39 billion, according to Crunchbase.

That's a lot of dough dumped into a company working on a product few have seen.

So far, all we know for sure is that Magic Leap is experimenting with augmented reality (AR), the technology where you wear special glasses and view digital information and images over the real world. (Sort of like Google Glass or Microsoft's HoloLens.)

But Magic Leap is supposedly a leap ahead of those gadgets, something so realistic that the company calls its technology cinematic reality. Its website is full of lofty statements that promise to reinvent entertainment, education, and productivity, but with no detail on how that'll happen.

Magic Leap promises nothing less than the next evolutionary step of computing, to replace your laptop, your phone and your TV.

Even with all that hype, the few people who have tried the product gush about it with the enthusiasm that can only be reserved for something truly mind blowing.

For example, here's how Bing Gordon of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins described it after the firm invested in Magic Leap in 2014:

The product is amazing, even at this stage. I’ve been around technology for decades, and this makes my head spin — in a good way. My eyes tell me that this world is real, not just painted with perspective. I feel motion without my inner ears rebelling. Over the years, I have played a part in creating many magic tricks, from one platform to the next. But this is different.

That's from a guy who's seen a lot in his career. He was one of the original founders of Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers in the world. And that's just for starters.

A lot of tech experts think AR and VR are the next major computing platforms. It ultimately has the potential to replace most of the screens in your life, including your smartphone. That's huge. And the fact that Magic Leap has over a billion dollars in investment from a lot of smart people in the industry is evidence that it's working on a profound advancement of the platform.

If you want to be pessimistic, then sure, maybe investors are just whipping themselves into a frenzy after Facebook spent $2 billion on the VR company Oculus. Or that Google is starting its own VR division. Or that Apple has hundreds of people working on AR and VR. Maybe Magic Leap is nothing more than a promise to change the world, the Theranos of consumer gadgets. It wouldn't be the first time VCs were duped into pumping money into nothing more than a dream.

But this case feels different. There's a real product in the works. Some of the most powerful people in tech (like Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, who's now on Magic Leap's board) have tried it. And they were so blown away they were willing to plop down mega bucks to make Magic Leap a reality.

It has to be mind blowing, right?

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This startup must be working on something truly mind-blowing from Business Insider: Steve Kovach