The company sought to completely change how we interact with computers, but now Leap Motion is selling itself off.
Apple reportedly tried to get their hands on the hand-tracking tech, which Leap Motion rebuffed, but now the hyped nine-year-old consumer startup is being absorbed into the younger, enterprise-focused UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal this morning; we’ve heard the same from a source familiar with the deal.
The report further detailed that the purchase price was a paltry $30 million, nearly one-tenth the company’s most recent valuation. CEO Michael Buckwald will also not be staying on with the company post-acquisition, we’ve learned.
Leap Motion raised nearly $94 million off of their mind-bending demos of their hand-tracking technology, but they were ultimately unable to ever zero in on a customer base that could sustain them. Even as the company pivoted into the niche VR industry, the startup remained a solution in search of a problem.
In 2011, when we first covered the startup, then called OcuSpec, it had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. At the time, Buckwald told us that he was building motion-sensing tech that was “radically more powerful and affordable than anything currently available,” though he kept many details under wraps.
Source: Once poised to kill the mouse and keyboard, Leap Motion plays its final hand – TechCrunch
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