Clay Bavor

Clay Bavor is a technology executive who led Google's virtual and augmented reality work for most of the period from 2014 to 2023. He turned the Google Cardboard prototype into a product launched at Google I/O in 2014, became vice president of virtual reality when Google created a dedicated VR division in January 2016, and introduced the Daydream mobile VR platform, the Daydream View headset and the Daydream standalone headset program. His remit later covered augmented reality projects including ARCore, Google Lens and the Project Starline 3D video booth, and from November 2021 he ran a new Google Labs group that reported directly to chief executive Sundar Pichai.

Bavor left Google in March 2023 after 18 years to co-found Sierra, an artificial intelligence company that sells customer service agents, with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every claim, quote, date and figure against its cited source (MIT Technology Review, Fortune, UploadVR, Time, TechCrunch, Trusted Reviews, Android Police, Qualcomm release, CNBC, Road to VR, Google blog, MIXED, 9to5Google, Sierra), plus links and categories. About review dates.

Early life and education

Bavor studied computer science at Princeton University. In a 2016 profile, Time described him as having been interested since childhood in making unreal things look real, through photorealistic computer graphics, 3D modeling and virtual reality.

Career

Google product management

Bavor joined Google in 2005 and first worked with Bret Taylor there that year. As a vice president of product management he led the product and design teams for Gmail, Google Docs and Google Apps for Enterprise, and earlier in his tenure he also led teams for advertising and Search products.

Google Cardboard

Cardboard began as a side project by David Coz and Damien Henry, engineers at Google's Paris office. In spring 2014 Coz brought the first prototypes to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, where they were shown to co-founder Larry Page after a weekly all-hands meeting. According to MIT Technology Review, Bavor's then boss, Sundar Pichai, called him in the next day to try the viewer, which showed Street View imagery of Paris, and told him to turn it into a real product to be launched two months later at Google's developer conference. Cardboard debuted during the Google I/O keynote in June 2014, and Google released a developer toolkit and made the viewer design open for anyone to copy or modify.

Bavor oversaw Cardboard from its 2014 launch while still in charge of Google's productivity apps. He argued that the smartphone was the way to bring VR to a wide audience. "You already have this device in your pocket that, when you add some cardboard, turns into a good VR viewer," he told MIT Technology Review in 2015. By November 2015 Google estimated that it and other companies had sold or given away more than a million Cardboard kits, and Google was also developing the Jump camera rig for VR video and sending Cardboard kits to schools for virtual class trips. In January 2016 Time reported that 5 million Cardboard viewers had shipped; in the same interview Bavor described early engineering problems such as building an input method, based on the phone's magnetometer, for a phone sealed inside a cardboard box.

Vice president of virtual reality

On January 12, 2016, Google created a dedicated virtual reality division with Bavor as its head. Pichai appointed him to the new role, titled VP, Virtual Reality; UploadVR, citing Re/code, reported that Bavor had been spending more and more of his time on VR, and that his apps responsibilities passed to Diane Greene. Fortune later reported that in the role he reported directly to Pichai.

At the Google I/O keynote in May 2016, Bavor introduced Daydream, a VR platform built into the upcoming Android N release. It combined a reference specification for VR-ready smartphones, a reference headset design, a motion controller and a VR mode in Android, and Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, ZTE, Asus, Alcatel and Xiaomi were named as partners. In June 2016, while speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, he told The Wall Street Journal that the share of people who had used or even knew about VR was "approximately zero percent of the world," and predicted "a slower ramp than people appreciate."

On October 4, 2016, at Google's hardware event in San Francisco, Bavor presented Google's own Daydream View headset and controller, priced at US$79 and due in November 2016. He described the fabric-covered headset as "soft and cozy" and said Google had worked with clothing manufacturers on its design; the first compatible phone was Google's Pixel.

Standalone headsets and display research

At Google I/O on May 17, 2017, Google announced Daydream standalone VR headsets that needed no phone or PC, built on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 reference design, with HTC Vive and Lenovo as the first hardware partners. The headsets used WorldSense, Google's inside-out tracking system, for positional tracking without external sensors. In Qualcomm's announcement, Bavor, credited as vice president of virtual reality, said the reference design "will enable manufacturers to build a whole new category of VR devices." Speaking to CNBC that week, he said the tracking made "the view in the virtual world perfectly correspond with your motion in the real world," which he tied to comfort. Only one standalone model, the Lenovo Mirage Solo, reached the market.

In a keynote at SID Display Week in 2017, Bavor, then Google's vice president of VR and AR, said Google was working with Sharp on LCDs for VR and had "partnered deeply with one of the leading OLED manufacturers in the world" on a VR display with about 20 megapixels per eye, ten times the pixel count of commercial VR displays of the time. He estimated that driving such panels at 90-120 frames per second would need data rates of 50-100 Gb/s, and pointed to eye tracking with foveated rendering as a way to make them practical.

At Google I/O in May 2018, days after the Mirage Solo launched, Bavor told UploadVR that Google had not confirmed any further standalone devices, but said: "I am an emphatic believer in the long term promise of VR, AR and all things as I call them 'Immersive Computing'," adding that Google was "making investments for the long term."

Augmented reality and Project Starline

As head of Google's AR and VR work, Bavor was also responsible for augmented reality projects such as the ARCore smartphone API, and MIXED wrote that he was reportedly responsible for Google's shift in emphasis from VR to smartphone AR. CNBC and Sierra both credit him with leading Google Lens as well.

On May 18, 2021, Bavor announced Project Starline on Google's blog. It was a booth that showed a remote person life-size and in three dimensions without glasses or a headset, using computer vision, machine learning, spatial audio, real-time compression and a light field display. He wrote: "Imagine looking through a sort of magic window, and through that window, you see another person, life-size and in three dimensions." At the time it ran only in a few Google offices on custom hardware, with trial deployments with enterprise partners planned for later that year.

Google Labs

In a reorganization reported on November 11, 2021, Google created a Labs group led by Bavor that combined its AR and VR efforts, Project Starline and the Area 120 incubator. Bavor reported directly to Pichai, and a Google spokesperson said his work would "focus on long-term technology projects that are in direct support of our core products and businesses." 9to5Google reported that the group's AR and VR work included ARCore.

Bavor announced on February 8, 2023 that he was leaving Google after 18 years, with his departure set for March. Google said his position would not be filled. The Labs team moved to Google's Technology & Society organization, and its AR work was split between the Platforms & Ecosystems division and the Devices & Services division under Rick Osterloh.

Sierra

Bavor co-founded Sierra with Bret Taylor in 2023. In his departure announcement he wrote that the two "share an obsession with recent advances in AI." In February 2024 Fortune reported that the company had raised US$110 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. In May 2026 CNBC reported that Sierra, based in San Francisco, had raised US$950 million at a post-money valuation of US$15.8 billion, led by Tiger Global and Google's GV; the company sells AI customer service agents and said it had passed US$150 million in annual recurring revenue. As of September 2026 Sierra's website lists Bavor as its co-founder.

See also

• Google Cardboard
• Daydream
• WorldSense
• Google