Top-secret startup Magic Leap has raised a record-breaking amount of money in pursuit of a radical concept: Blending the digital and the physical. "Mixed reality" will transform the way we work, play, shop and see—and entire industries will be changed forever
Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz: Making the unreal real
Image: Jamel Toppin for Forbes
The hottest ticket in tech is an invitation to a banal South Florida business park, indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America’s suburban landscape. Inside, it’s a whole different story. A different reality, in fact. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. War machines, 75 feet tall, patrol the parking lot.
Even the office equipment does the impossible. The high-definition television hanging on the wall seems perfectly normal. Until it vanishes. A moment later, it reappears in the middle of the room. Incredibly, it is now levitating in mid-air. Get as close as you’d like, check it out from different angles. It’s 80 inches diagonal, tuned to ESPN—and there is nothing holding it up.
The TV looks real, but it is not. All these wonders are illusions, conjured into being through the lenses of a “mixed reality” (MR)headset—the arcane invention of the startup called Magic Leap.
Like any good magician, founder and CEO Rony Abovitz, 45, keeps his cards close to his chest. Magic Leap has operated in extreme secrecy since it was founded in 2011. Only a few people got to see its technology, even fewer knew how it worked, and all of them were buried under so many non-disclosure agreements that they could barely admit the company existed.
Yet massive amounts of money were flowing down to Dania Beach, Florida, a town of 30,000 just south of Fort Lauderdale. To date, Magic Leap has raised nearly $1.4 billion in venture capital, including $794 million this past February, reportedly the largest C round in history. Seemingly every blue-chip tech investor has a chunk, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Google, JPMorgan, Fidelity and Alibaba, plus there’s backing from less conventional sources such as Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment, the maker of films like Godzilla and Jurassic World. Magic Leap was valued at $4.5 billion in its latest round of financing. If Abovitz has held on to just 22 percent of the company—which he denies—he’s a billionaire.
(This story appears in the 23 December, 2016 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)