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By Malcolm Owen
Wednesday October 31, 2018, 8:59 PT (11:59 am ET)
Apple was about to acquire the augmented reality startup Leap Motion earlier this year, its second attempt to buy the firm, but a report says the deal failed several days before the end of the transaction. caused the failure of the purchase.
The Leap Motion controller allowed the gesture controls on a Mac to use an additional device.
Apple would have been about to acquire Leap Motion, the creators of a gesture-based controller, for an amount between $ 30 and $ 50 million in the spring of 2018. Apple reportedly spoke to its resources department and sent official letters of offer shortly before the offer was made.
Although the exact cause of the failure is unknown, several anonymous employees have reported Internal business the collapse may have been caused by "swirling negatives" around the company. Co-founders Michael Buckwald and David Holz criticized the negativity as his activities in a previous acquisition attempt likely influenced Apple's decision.
The initial attempt in 2013 involved a meeting between the co-founders and Apple, but the meeting apparently went badly. CTO Holz would have lost interest in the offer to acquire the team and intellectual property, but also insulted, accusing Apple of not being innovative, to be a technology "sucked" and rent Android.
A source of reports who worked at the time says that Holz wrote comments like "I will never work for these guys, they are the devil".
Apple continued to show interest in acquiring the company, although Holz's view of it contradicted its purchase.
The company's latest bid to buy is well below what it was worth before, with late-2013 B-series financing pricing the company at around $ 306 million. Despite a $ 50 million secondary funding in 2017 and a change of focus in favor of augmented reality, the continued existence of Leap Motion has apparently not working as expected.
Sources say the company made poor management decisions, such as spending money on offices in the expensive SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, before moving to the financial district. , more economical.
It's likely that Apple's interest in the firm is due to its work in Augmented Reality, an area that Apple has joined with ARKit for iOS, as well as rumors about an anti-glare headset or "smart glasses" in development. Leap Motion also has more than 100 patents and applications, which could be of interest to Apple.
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