Rony Abovitz

Rony Abovitz (born 1971) is an American entrepreneur and biomedical engineer best known as the founder and former chief executive officer of Magic Leap, the augmented reality company he started in 2010 and led until 2020. Before Magic Leap he co-founded the surgical robotics company MAKO Surgical Corp., which Stryker Corporation acquired in 2013 for 1.65 billion dollars.

Under Abovitz, Magic Leap raised about 2.6 billion dollars from investors including Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba Group and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund while operating in near-total secrecy for years before releasing its first product. He described the company's goal as a "neurologically true reality," a mixed reality meant to drive the eye's photoreceptors the way real light would.

Early life and education

Abovitz was born in 1971 to an Orthodox Jewish family, the eldest of five children of Isaac and Itta Abovitz, whose family had immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio in 1962. In 1983 the family moved to Hollywood, Florida, and he attended Nova High School in Davie, Florida. He grew up playing Atari video games and received an Apple Macintosh as an early computer. He attended the University of Miami, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in biomedical engineering and also worked as a cartoonist for the student newspaper.

Surgical robotics: Z-KAT and MAKO Surgical

In 1997 Abovitz co-founded Z-KAT, Inc., an early surgical-technology company, together with William Tapia, Michael Peshkin, Julio Santos-Munne and Wayne J. Kerness. In 2004 he and other Z-KAT members founded MAKO Surgical Corp. to build robotic-arm platforms that assist orthopedic surgeons. The company's product was the RIO (Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopedic System), used together with its RESTORIS implants in a procedure branded MAKOplasty for partial knee and total hip replacement. The first MAKOplasty partial knee replacement was performed in June 2006 and the first total hip procedure in October 2010.

MAKO went public on the NASDAQ in February 2008 under the ticker symbol MAKO. Within the company Abovitz held senior technical leadership roles, working on research and development and as the firm's chief technology and visionary executive. On September 25, 2013, MAKO's board accepted an offer from Stryker Corporation to acquire the company for 1.65 billion dollars, a deal that closed in December 2013. By the end of 2019 there were about 860 Mako robots installed worldwide, roughly 700 of them in the United States.

Magic Leap

Abovitz began work on Magic Leap in 2010, starting in his garage and developing the project at night while still working at MAKO during the day. The company pursued what it called a "digital lightfield" display, projecting virtual imagery into the eye so that the brain would accept it alongside real-world objects. Abovitz partnered with the New Zealand effects studio Weta Workshop on creative content.

For most of its first decade Magic Leap revealed almost nothing about its technology, and Abovitz rarely gave interviews. Despite the secrecy the company attracted large investments. In October 2014, while still in stealth mode, it raised more than 540 million dollars from Google, Qualcomm, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, among others. A December 2015 Series C round brought in about 827 million dollars at a 3.7 billion dollar valuation, and a March 2018 Series D of about 461 million dollars was led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

The first product, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition, shipped on August 8, 2018, distributed in the United States through AT&T at a starting price of 2,295 dollars. The headset (Lightwear) connected to a hip-worn computing puck (Lightpack) and a handheld controller (Control). Key specifications of the device Abovitz brought to market are below.

Magic Leap One Creator Edition (2018)

Component	Specification
Processor	NVIDIA Tegra X2 (2 Denver 2.0 cores plus 4 ARM Cortex-A57 cores)
Graphics	NVIDIA Pascal GPU, 256 CUDA cores
Memory	8 GB RAM
Storage	128 GB
Display	"Digital Lightfield" waveguide optics, two focal planes
Field of view	40 degrees horizontal, 30 degrees vertical (about 50 degrees diagonal)
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 802.11ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C
Launch price	2,295 US dollars

Sales of the Magic Leap One fell well short of expectations, and the company shifted its focus from consumers toward enterprise customers. On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap cut about half of its workforce.

Departure from Magic Leap

On May 28, 2020, Abovitz announced that Magic Leap had raised about 350 million dollars in new funding and that he would step down as chief executive. He framed the move around the company's new enterprise direction, saying that as Magic Leap pivoted to commercializing enterprise spatial computing "a change in my role was a natural next step," and that he would continue to provide strategy and vision at the board level. On July 7, 2020, the company named former Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson, who had worked on the HoloLens and on Qualcomm's Vuforia, as its new chief executive; she took the role in August 2020. Abovitz helped recruit Johnson and remained on the company's board.

Magic Leap continued after his departure: it released the enterprise-oriented Magic Leap 2 on September 30, 2022, and Ross Rosenberg became chief executive in 2023.

Later work: Sun and Thunder and SynthBee

In late 2020 Abovitz founded a new venture, Sun and Thunder, to create what he calls "synthetic beings," AI-driven characters used for interactive storytelling, film and music within spatial computing environments. He contrasted the project's smaller scale with Magic Leap, comparing it to "a craft beer" or "something Studio Ghibli would do," and said he was initially funding it himself. Its first character, a musician named Jako Vega, also known as Yellow Dove, anchored an animated short, "Yellow Dove Aftermath," that screened at film festivals. Abovitz has also been associated with a related stealth company, SynthBee, Inc. As of 2026 he is listed as a senior advisor and executive coach at Boston Consulting Group, advising on surgical robotics, health care, spatial computing and artificial intelligence.

Role in VR and AR

Abovitz is one of the more prominent figures in the augmented reality field, both for the scale of capital he raised and for the expectations Magic Leap set during the 2010s. His central technical idea was that a head-worn display should match how human vision actually works rather than reproduce a full physical light field. He argued that the brain does not take in an infinite light-field signal but "chops it up," so a display only needs to be as physiologically accurate as the visual system requires, an approach he summarized as "neurologically true reality." To address the vergence-accommodation conflict that causes discomfort in many head-mounted display systems, the Magic Leap One presented imagery at two focal planes rather than a single fixed focus.

Magic Leap's secrecy, large funding, and the gap between early demonstration videos and the eventual 40-degree field of view of the shipping Magic Leap One made Abovitz and the company a frequent reference point in coverage of mixed reality hype and expectations during this period. His earlier work also connects consumer XR to medical robotics: the surgical-robotics platform he built at MAKO is an example of computer-assisted, sensor-guided interaction with the physical world, a lineage he carried into spatial computing. The Magic Leap 1's cloud services were shut down on December 31, 2024, rendering the original devices nonfunctional, the end of the first hardware generation Abovitz shipped.