Motion-Control Start-Up Leap Nabs $30 Million in Funding, Partners With Asus

Leap Motion, the San Francisco-based start-up that makes impressive gesture-control technology for computers, has secured $30 million in funding. The Series B round was led by existing investor Founders Fund, as well as Highland Capital Partners.

The Leap Motion sensor, positioned in front of a MacBook.

The San Francisco-based start-up has also just announced a partnership with Asus to distribute Leap’s technology with some Asus notebooks and PCs, following Leap’s retail launch in the first quarter of this year.

The Leap is a tiny, three-inch sensor device that’s placed in front of the computer keyboard to track gestures and reflect the movements onscreen. As I’ve written before, Leap acts sort of like a super-precise Kinect, where the user’s fingers act as controls; waving them just a few inches in front of the screen allows the user to input, create, shape or play.

Last fall Leap, which was co-founded by Michael Buckwald and David Holz, and has recently hired former Apple exec Andy Miller as president, announced plans for an app store where Leap users can purchase and download apps. In December, the company shipped 10,000 developer kits to spur the creation of these apps.

The company said in a prepared statement that it planned to use the funding for manufacturing the Leap ahead of the product’s retail launch. “Leap Motion plans to make hundreds of thousands, to millions, of devices to meet unprecedented global demand.”