Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

Well that was the logical outcome. Their technology was interesting but it clearly wasn't viable as a stand-alone compact camera. Everyone expected it would eventually be integrated into smartphones.

When I saw Google's spherical-photo capture bot -- basically an array of Lytro cameras -- I figured this would happen soon.

Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop sooner or up to which point they feel like this direction is done. I felt they never really listened to the photographer community during the process, or answer support sufficiently, they have done pretty much the exact opposite of user first or user driven product development in my opinion, and this still left me confused today. Burning a few million dollars a month, I feel it really took a series of very bad decisions to lead to this financial outcome.

From the article, the sale price is estimated at $40 million, whilst the company had raised $200 million, most recently at a $360 million valuation.

Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.

They are buying them to make dash cams for self driving cars is my guess...

That tech in dash-cam video is priceless