By Nancy Dahlberg
Big news from South Florida serial entrepreneur Rony Abovitz and his new startup, SynthBee: They raised a $20 million seed round, led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, to grow SynthBee’s proprietary computing intelligence platform.
The Fort Lauderdale-based startup aims to safely apply computing intelligence to accelerate human innovation across a wide array of industries. “SynthBee is poised to revolutionize the way enterprises innovate and deliver high-value solutions to market,” said Crosspoint Capital’s Managing Director Andre Fuetsch.
“From robotic surgical applications to state of the art spatial computing and augmented reality platforms, Rony’s latest vision for SynthBee will accelerate and enhance humans’ creative and problem-solving capabilities to an entirely new level,” Crosspoint’s Fuetsch added.
Indeed, Abovitz is well known in South Florida for building transformative companies, including founding Magic Leap, a leader in augmented reality spatial computing innovation he started in his garage around 2010 and stepped down from the CEO role in 2020. Prior to Magic Leap, he co-founded robotics innovator MAKO Surgical in 2004, which was acquired by Stryker Corp. for $1.65 billion in 2013.
Abovitz, SynthBee’s president and CEO, described his new company this way, in a statement: “Current implementations of large-scale artificial intelligence systems have significant architectural challenges, security risks, and ethical flaws, leading to questionable governance and computational autocracies. SynthBee was founded to solve these problems and to forge alternate pathways for enterprise customers, the developer community, and eventually everyone, based on the philosophy of computational democracy.”
In an appearance in April at eMerge Americas, Abovitz said AI unfortunately is currently synonymous with what he calls “computational autocracy, giant companies hoarding all data, all the know-how, in gigantic brains.” He continued, “The company we’re building, SynthBee, is hopefully an iconic computational democracy company. No one can get to control it.”
As of now, SynthBee is commercially engaged with Fortune 500 customers and is actively hiring for a variety of junior- and senior-level engineering roles. What’s more, SynthBee is already leaving a mark in South Florida in other ways.
Abovitz, a University of Miami alum, also announced at the eMerge Americas conference that SynthBee would be partnering with Miami Dade College on an innovation lab offering access to SynthBee’s technology platform, with opportunities for internships, fellowships and careers at the startup. The partnership will also extend beyond campus, and include collaboration with other local universities, physical-digital worlds, and more. The goal is to catalyze innovation by amplifying and supercharging ideas and new companies “to make this region one of the most interesting places for startups to happen anywhere in the world,” Abovitz said in the talk with MDC President Madeline Pumariega.
He also told the crowd at the eMerge conference that he is and always has been “super bullish” about developing tech companies in South Florida. When he was starting to build Mako in South Florida instead of Silicon Valley, “everyone said, ‘don’t build a company here, you’ll never get funded here. The robots won’t work and AI won’t work,’ and all of that was nonsense… There’s a lot of amazing talent in this area,” said Abovitz. And it’s why he again chose South Florida for startup No. 3.
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