Israeli Startup Sightful Lays Off 20 Employees Amid Strategic Shift

TapTechNews July 2nd news, Israeli startup Sightful has announced to lay off 20 people, accounting for one-third of its total workforce. This layoff is part of the company's strategic transformation. Sightful will focus on software development and stop producing and selling whole notebook computers, and its hardware department will also be dissolved.

Sightful was founded in 2020 and just one year later, it announced that it had received more than 60 million US dollars in financing from Aleph, Symbol and CornerVentures, and quickly became one of the most watched companies in Israel. Sightful was founded by Tamir Berliner and Tomer Kahan who had worked at MagicLeap and PrimeSense. The company developed a notebook computer that uses spatial computing technology to replace the physical screen. Users can open dozens of virtual windows through the accompanying AR glasses and can work comfortably in public places while ensuring that no privacy is leaked. Sightful began to sell the computer named Spacetop about a year ago at a price of 2000 US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 14579 Chinese Yuan), and recently renamed it Spacetop G1.

However, soon after, Sightful decided to give up the hardware part and focus on the operating system and software marketing for AR computers. The company said that this transformation is driven by the rapid technological progress in the computing market, as evidenced by the global tech giants' announcements of researching and developing artificial intelligence computers. Sightful believes that this move can accelerate its business model and enable its operating system to be deployed on various computers without being limited to its own devices.