Jaunt is letting go “a significant portion” of its staff and “winding down a number of VR products and content services in the coming weeks.”
The prepared explanation comes in a Medium blog post and an additional statement sent over email:
“Today we had to make some difficult decisions in an effort to realign Jaunt for continued success. We are restructuring the company, resulting in letting go of a significant portion of our staff. After these changes the company will be focussed exclusively on Augmented Reality and our XR Capture technology, which provides a clear path forward. It was a difficult day at Jaunt as we are losing some of the most amazing talent in the industry, each of whom have individually made groundbreaking contributions to the company and the industry as a whole.”
Jaunt was early in offering multi-platform apps for 360-degree content and the company also built camera systems to capture videos in that format raising over $100 million, according to Crunchbase, from investors including The Walt Disney Company, Evolution Media Partners, CMC, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, SMG, Axel Springer, ProSiebenSat.1 SE, The Madison Square Garden Company, Google Ventures, Peter Gotcher, and Sky.
“When you’re very early in a new video technology platform, it’s sometimes important to do lots of things. You got to cover a lot of bases. What that’s afforded Jaunt is kind of an early lead creating an end-to-end solution for video VR, for cinematic VR,” said then-new CEO George Kliavkoff in an interview with uploadvr.com 2016.
Kliavkoff was succeeded as CEO of Jaunt by Mitzi Reaugh, previously VP of Global Business Development and Strategy, on Oct. 1.
“Jaunt will continue to build innovative software utilizing our strong engineering team in San Mateo and our new Chicago-based engineering colleagues who joined us as part of our recent acquisition of the Personify Teleporter technology,” today’s blog post reads.
