Apple's buying spree continues

Published on Jun 12, 2023

Apple expands its VR/AR team with the acquisition of Miro

The day after Apple's announcement of its groundbreaking new visual computing platform last Monday, the Apple Vision Pro, The Verge reported Apple's acquisition of AR glasses start-up Mira. Apple confirmed the report.

The Mira acquisition indicates that Apple is continuing to buy companies with teams and technology that are important to its strategic plans, including in the area of VR/AR.

This CNBC report states "In February (2021), Apple CEO Tim Cook told shareholders that the company had bought about 100 companies in the past six years, which works out to the iPhone maker buying a company every three to four weeks."

It goes on to say, "Apple has gone on sprees picking up multiple firms in fields such as augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, maps, health, and semiconductors, signaling an increased emphasis on those technologies."

Apple is not alone. The week before the Apple Vision Pro announcement, Meta announced its new Quest 3 with many game-changing improvements over the previous model, and due to ship this fall.

Earlier this year Meta reportedly acquired VR Fitness developer Within, maker of popular VR Fitness app SuperNatural, for $400M (source). Since 2019, Meta has acquired 11 VR technology and game studios including CTRL-labs, Beat Games, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Downpour Interactive, BigBox VR, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, and Armature Studio (source).

The VirZOOM team is excited to be part of a fast-growing VR/AR industry in which multiple large companies are investing heavily in product development and actively buying up developers with proven teams and technology.

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Liked by Javier Cervantes, William Johnson, IV, Srini Gadiraju, and 6 others

Frederic Klaske

Jun 12, 2023

Why not start a bidding war for yourselves between Cook and Zuckerberg and see which one pays more to swallow up VirZOOM?

Eric Janszen

Jun 13, 2023

Hi Frederic. It's early days in this rapidly evolving visual computing platform space. Meta and Apple are now all-in but we haven't heard from Google and Microsoft yet, nor any of the Android smartphone makers like Samsung. Samsung shipped 270 million smartphones in 2022 alone. Safe bet these companies don't plan to sit around doing nothing while this new computing platform takes over the smartphone market over the next ten years. For VirZOOM shareholders it will pay to be patient. Having patent protected tech that lets us create high value apps for this new platform argues for waiting to exit until later when there are enough of these platforms in use that consumers download billions of apps a year as compared to a few million today. We need to ride the wave.