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.”
SynthBee is already commercially engaged with Fortune 500 customers. The startup is actively hiring for a variety of junior- and senior-level engineering roles, and SynthBee is also already leaving a mark in South Florida in other ways.
Abovitz, a University of Miami alum, announced at the eMerge Americas conference in April that SynthBee, which he then described vaguely as a different but better kind of AI company, 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 SynthBee. 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 eMerge that he was “super bullish” about developing tech companies in South Florida, and the region has come a long way. While building Mako in South Florida instead of Silicon Valley, he said, “people told me, ‘you’ll never get funded there. The robots won’t work. Nothing will work.’ All of that was nonsense.”
