Meron Gribetz

Meron Gribetz is a technology entrepreneur, raised in Israel, who founded Meta, the United States augmented reality startup that made the Meta 1 and Meta 2 optical see-through developer headsets, and was its chief executive officer. He started Meta while studying computer science and neuroscience at Columbia University, and presented the Meta 2 on stage at the TED2016 conference in Vancouver. His pitch for Meta centred on what he called a "natural machine": glasses that overlay computer-generated objects on the physical world and let the wearer interact with them by hand.

After Meta failed to close a new funding round in 2018 and the bank holding its debt sold the company's assets in early 2019, Gribetz turned to medical neurotechnology. Bloomberg reported in 2022 that he had started Inner Cosmos in 2019, a company developing a skull-implanted neurostimulation device for treatment-resistant depression.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited TED, CNET, BBC, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Comcast, PR Newswire, Y Combinator, Google Patents, Business Insider, Road to VR, Engadget, TechCrunch and Next Reality pages, the Genedics v. Meta order, Bloomberg reprints and Inner Cosmos pages; medical results are company-reported. About review dates.

Early life and education

Gribetz grew up in Israel. According to his TED speaker biography, his first encounter with augmented reality came during his service in "an elite technological unit of the Intelligence Corps"; Bloomberg also reported that he served in a unit of the Israeli military. He then studied computer science and neuroscience at Columbia University in New York, and the same TED biography says those studies shaped the "Neurointerface" design approach behind Meta's 3D user interface. CNET described him in 2013 as a 27-year-old former neuroscience graduate student. Comcast Ventures, an investor in Meta, wrote in 2016 that he dropped out of Columbia to start the company.

Gribetz has given more than one account of where the idea for Meta came from. MIT Technology Review reported that it struck him in 2011, when sunlight shining through an airplane window hit the lens of his sunglasses. He told the BBC in 2016 that he was inspired while watching people on their mobile devices in a New York bar, and thought tools for seeing and sharing content would be better than users "hunched over a small rectangle". Next Reality dated the start to a 2011 conversation in Harlem, near Columbia, with a smartphone-focused friend, after which he built experimental marker-based AR interfaces.

Career

Founding Meta

Gribetz launched Meta as a business in December 2012. CNET reported that the company started that month with US$1 million in seed funding, the backing of Y Combinator's Paul Graham, and wearable computing researcher Steve Mann as chief scientist. Meta's May 2013 launch announcement described it as an enterprise "spun out of Columbia University", led by Gribetz "in collaboration with" Columbia professor Steven Feiner, and named Ben Sand as his "co-pilot". Y Combinator lists Gribetz as founder and CEO of Meta in its Summer 2013 batch, with Ben Sand (founder and co-CEO) and Raymond Lo (founder and CTO). Gribetz and Mann are the named inventors on a US patent application filed in January 2014 for "extramissive spatial imaging digital eye glass" apparatus.

In August 2013, CNET found Gribetz and a team of fewer than 25 people working out of a house in Los Altos Hills, California, building glasses, an operating system and apps. He described the product as a "natural machine", contrasted Google Glass, which he called a "notification machine" and "an accessory for the phone", and called the Oculus Rift a "matrix machine" that transports the user to a separate virtual world. "Our philosophy is to make it fun before you make it small," he told CNET. Next Reality reported that the company's Kickstarter campaign raised US$194,444 against a US$100,000 goal, and the Meta 1 Development Kit was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2014. Wired reported that he shipped the Meta 1 to developers in 2014.

Meta 2 and TED

On 17 February 2016 Gribetz gave the talk "A glimpse of the future through an augmented reality headset" at TED2016, in which he demonstrated the Meta 2 headset. Road to VR reported that he unveiled the headset from beneath a red sheet and demonstrated a "holographic" call in which a remote colleague appeared in his view and handed him an AR model of a brain. He told the BBC that Meta was "creating 'natural machines' that feel like extensions of ourselves", and predicted that within five years the headset would shrink to the size of a thin piece of glass. Later that month, Business Insider reported that Gribetz had told technology writer Robert Scoble he expected to throw away all the monitors in his office by the following year, and that a new product announcement would be made on 2 March. Wired gave the Meta 2's price as US$949, less than a third of the price of Microsoft HoloLens, and noted that unlike HoloLens it had to be tethered to a computer.

Wired wrote in 2016 that Gribetz expected the first users to be designers, mechanical engineers and medical professionals working with 3D models. MIT Technology Review reported in August 2016 that he had raised US$73 million and wanted his staff to stop using external monitors and mice with their laptops "by next spring", working instead through the Meta 2's hand-based input. When Comcast Ventures joined Meta's US$50 million Series B with Lenovo, Tencent and Horizons Ventures in June 2016, Gribetz credited "our neuroscience-based interface design approach to computing" for setting the company apart.

Funding collapse and asset sale

In September 2018, a promised US$20 million investment from a Chinese company fell through, and Meta furloughed two-thirds of its roughly 100 employees for 30 days, according to Bloomberg reporting summarized by Engadget. Gribetz told Bloomberg that "the Chinese government sent an official request to our lead investor to re-evaluate the deal". He later told TechCrunch that after the furlough "no one stepped in" to close the funding gap.

By January 2019 the company's assets had been sold for less than its bank was owed. Gribetz did not name the buyer, described it as a "known name", and said it had committed to supporting hardware already on the market. TechCrunch put the total Meta had raised at nearly US$83 million, with a valuation that had peaked at as much as US$300 million. He told Next Reality that "the Chinese blocked the funding deal at the last minute" and that the sale "was between the bank and the third party", not between him and the buyer. Road to VR reported that he had confirmed to Variety that he was "no longer the owner of the company". Next Reality later described a new company, Meta View, as having risen from the defunct company's assets under chief executive Jay Wright, who said the assets bought from the former Meta Company were among the building blocks of the products later launched as Campfire. An August 2019 order in Genedics, LLC v. Meta Company, a patent case in which default was entered after Meta failed to retain counsel, identified Gribetz as Meta's chief executive officer and founder.

Looking back in the same Next Reality interview, Gribetz said Meta had been "the first full AR system with hand tracking, optics, and world tracking", that the company "were early, for sure", and that his goal was still to put an AR headset "on a billion heads".

Inner Cosmos

According to Bloomberg, Gribetz started Inner Cosmos in 2019. In March 2022 the company, then based in Scotts Valley, California, planned to announce US$10.25 million in equity funding led by Lool Ventures. Bloomberg named neurosurgeon Eric Leuthardt and primatologist Dan Moran of Washington University in St. Louis as his co-founders, and reported that the company had received an exemption from the US Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the timeline for testing on people. The company calls its device a "Digital Pill": a small implant placed in the bone of the skull that stimulates brain networks, which the company aims at treatment-resistant depression.

Bloomberg reported in September 2022 that doctors in St. Louis had implanted the first patient that summer, in what it described as the first trial of its kind to use implants in the skull bone to treat depression. Inner Cosmos states that its first patient was implanted at Washington University in 2022, a second in 2023 and a third in 2024, and that the trial uses a proxy device. In a May 2025 update, its chief medical officer reported interim outcomes from three patients totalling 36 patient-months in an FDA-approved early safety and feasibility study; these are company-reported results. As of October 2026 the company's website announces that it has completed its FDA early feasibility study, and its team page lists Gribetz as a founder and chief executive officer.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Notes
2016	Wired, "25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business"	Entry titled "Augmented reality can be affordable", listing him as founder and CEO of Meta
2016	MIT Technology Review, Innovators Under 35	Entrepreneurs category, profiled on 23 August 2016

His TED speaker biography also states that he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in technology.

See also

• Meta (augmented reality company)
• Meta 2
• Steve Mann