Urho Konttori

Urho Konttori is a Finnish technology entrepreneur and inventor who co-founded the professional virtual reality and mixed reality headset maker Varjo in 2016 and, since 2024, has been co-founder and chief executive of Distance Technologies, a Helsinki company that develops glasses-free mixed reality displays. Before Varjo he spent more than 15 years on hardware and software projects at Nokia and Microsoft, including operating system work for the Linux-based Nokia N900 and N9 phones.

At Varjo, Konttori was the company's chief executive when it raised its first venture rounds in 2017 and 2018, its chief product officer when it launched its first headset, the Varjo VR-1, in 2019, and later its chief technology officer. He is a named inventor on Varjo's early patents for a head-mounted display that merges a high-resolution "focus" display with a wide "context" display, and on later patents for light field displays and head-up displays at Distance.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Roles, dates, quotes, funding figures and patent numbers, inventors, assignees and filing/grant dates checked against the cited Varjo interview, AWE and EmTech bios, EIB, Road to VR, Tech.eu, TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, Digital Engineering 24/7, Yrittajat, Auganix, Distance releases and founders page, CNBC, Yle, DEVELOP3D, FORVIA HELLA and Google Patents. About review dates.

Early life and education

Konttori grew up in Helsinki, about two kilometres from the site of Varjo's later headquarters, according to a profile published by the European Investment Bank. The profile says he played role-playing games such as Shadowrun, read science fiction, and named William Gibson's Neuromancer as the book that influenced him most in that period. In a 2021 interview he said his interest in VR began in the 1990s with role-playing games and cyberpunk books, and that he owned a VFX1 headset for a time before selling it for what he had paid.

Conference biographies from 2019 and 2021 state that he holds a bachelor's degree (B.Sc.) in algorithms; they do not name the institution.

Career

Nokia and Microsoft

Konttori said he joined Nokia in the 2000s because the company was working on what it called the "internet tablet", which he saw as the future of communications, and that his work there went on to cover phones and operating systems. His AWE speaker biography says he led the development of several operating systems, among them the Linux-based software of the Nokia N900 and N9. TechCrunch reported in 2018 that during his time at Nokia and Microsoft he had played a pivotal role in the MeeGo-based N9 smartphone and in high-end Lumia devices. His EmTech MIT 2021 biography describes his role at Nokia and Microsoft as scouting and defining consumer innovations such as novel cameras, see-through touchscreen fingerprint sensors and VR headset technology, and states that he held more than ten patents at the time.

In his account, the Nokia business he worked in was later acquired by Microsoft. In his account, Todd Holmdahl, who led hardware development at Microsoft, asked him to lead VR headset development for the Xbox team, which he agreed to do; he had also worked with the HoloLens teams. Patent filings from this period name him as an inventor on a Nokia application about touch-input control (filed 2012) and on Microsoft patents for a two-part device with a split imaging system (filed 2016, granted 2018).

Varjo

Konttori founded Varjo in the summer of 2016 with Niko Eiden, another Microsoft colleague; he has said that the two were deciding what to do next while at Microsoft, and that Eiden had originally started the HoloLens project. On 1 December 2016 Varjo filed the patent applications that became US 9,711,072 and US 9,711,114, both granted on 18 July 2017, with Konttori, Klaus Melakari and Oiva Arvo Oskari Sahlsten as inventors. The first describes a headset in which a lower-resolution context display and a higher-resolution focus display are merged by an optical combiner into one continuous image, with the context view spanning 40 to 220 degrees and the focus view 5 to 60 degrees. A gaze-tracking patent for head-mounted displays, filed in July 2017 with Konttori as first-named inventor, was granted in August 2019.

In September 2017 Road to VR and Tech.eu both identified Konttori as Varjo's CEO when the company announced an US$8.2 million Series A round led by EQT Ventures. He said the company was "moving past research into the development stage". TechCrunch again called him co-founder and CEO in October 2018, when Atomico led a US$31 million Series B. He told the publication that Varjo was selling to "design-driven" industries such as simulation and training, architecture and automotive, and that the resolution of existing headsets left designers and engineers working or training "half blind".

By the launch of the VR-1 in February 2019 he was Varjo's chief product officer. SiliconANGLE quoted him saying the team had worked "for over two years" on the headset, and that its eye tracker was accurate enough to be used for user interaction and useful in training, because a trainer could see what a trainee was looking at. His AWE EU 2019 speaker profile also lists him as chief product officer.

By 2021 Konttori was Varjo's chief technology officer. In a July 2021 interview with the Finnish entrepreneurs' newspaper Yrittäjät, where he was described as Varjo's founder and technology director, he said Japan and the United States were important markets and that the company had halved its prices to reach more companies. In a December 2021 interview after the launch of the Varjo Aero, he said the Aero was "not replacing" Varjo's other headsets but was "one additional tier in our portfolio of good, better, best". In the same interview he described the cloud computing work behind Varjo Reality Cloud and the Teleport telepresence project, which he said came from Varjo's "fusion" with the Dimension10 team. The European Investment Bank's page on its 2021 financing of Varjo quotes him, as co-founder and chief technology officer, on capturing surroundings in 3D and inviting others into "that same exact reality".

In late April 2022 he began a United States roadshow to introduce Varjo Reality Cloud. He told Digital Engineering 24/7 that Varjo had developed "a breakthrough technology to get lossless streaming", using eye tracking to prioritize the pixels a user is looking at, and the publication reported a planned subscription of US$1,495 per month for up to five concurrent users per company. He remained an inventor on Varjo patents; one on gaze-adaptive image reprojection, filed in August 2023 with Mikko Strandborg, was granted in March 2025.

Some sources give him other Varjo titles. Digital Engineering 24/7 called him "founder and CEO" in May 2022, Distance Technologies' founders page describes him as Varjo's former CEO and co-founder, and the European Investment Bank page that calls him chief technology officer also describes him as Varjo's chief executive. Varjo's own August 2020 announcement of its Series C round, however, named Timo Toikkanen as the new CEO and Niko Eiden as the previous one. CNBC described him in 2024 as Varjo's former chief technology officer.

Distance Technologies

Distance Technologies came out of stealth on 13 June 2024 with Konttori as CEO and co-founder. The company announced a US$2.7 million pre-seed round led by FOV Ventures and Maki.vc and said a prototype had been shown privately at AWE USA 2024. In the launch release he said he had once had the chance to "bottle lightning" as a Varjo co-founder, with what he called "the first human-eye resolution XR headset", and was trying to do it again.

On 24 September 2024 Distance announced a 10 million euro seed round led by GV, the venture arm of Alphabet. Konttori said the company's vision was to bring mixed reality "everywhere, whether you can wear a headset or not". He told Yle that this was GV's first investment in a Finnish company and that the company had been contacted by Google a couple of weeks into the round. Speaking to CNBC, he called the need to wear something on the head one of the great barriers for mixed reality, and said Distance was "switching into the product cycle" after its research phase, with a next generation of optics planned for early 2025.

He presented a talk titled "Glasses-free Mixed Reality - Towards The Final Frontier" at AWE USA 2025 on 12 June 2025. In a January 2026 Tech.eu interview about Distance's defense work, he described the company's head-mounted Field Operator HUD as usable by a vehicle commander outside the tank or inside with the hatch closed, and said Distance licenses its technology to Tier One suppliers, who build and certify the final hardware. When FORVIA HELLA announced an investment in Distance and a development partnership for a 3D augmented reality head-up display on 9 September 2026, it quoted Konttori as co-founder and CEO of Distance.

Patents

Google Patents lists several dozen patents and applications naming Konttori as an inventor, assigned to Nokia, Microsoft, Varjo Technologies and Distance Technologies. A selection:

Number	Title	Assignee	Filed	Granted
US 2013/0307790 A1	Methods and apparatus for device control	Nokia	17 May 2012	(application)
US 10,021,281 B2	Device with split imaging system	Microsoft Technology Licensing	6 June 2016	10 July 2018
US 9,711,072 B1	Display apparatus and method of displaying using focus and context displays	Varjo Technologies	1 December 2016	18 July 2017
US 9,711,114 B1	Display apparatus and method of displaying using projectors	Varjo Technologies	1 December 2016	18 July 2017
US 10,395,111 B2	Gaze-tracking system and method	Varjo Technologies	13 July 2017	27 August 2019
US 12,254,131 B1	Gaze-adaptive image reprojection	Varjo Technologies	29 August 2023	18 March 2025
US 12,196,960 B1	Local dimming and compensation in light field display	Distance Technologies	9 April 2024	14 January 2025
US 12,386,175 B1	Augmenting reality with light field display and waveguide display	Distance Technologies	5 June 2024	12 August 2025