Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Product ‘a rocket on a launch pad’
Plantation-based exec touts future
MIAMI BEACH – South Florida’s most discussed CEO, Rony Abovitz of Plantation-based Magic Leap, said Tuesday the region is on the cusp of becoming one of the top technology sectors in the nation.
“That’s about to happen,” said Abovitz, a keynote speaker at the fourth annual eMerge Americas conference in Miami Beach.
But the secretive entrepreneur would provide only hints of how far Magic Leap has traveled toward launching its first product: “If we were at NASA … you would see a rocket sitting on the launch pad,” Abovitz said. “Launch is not far away.”
Abovitz’s keynote was jammed with people hoping to hear what is happening with his company, which employs 800 in Plantation and Dania Beach. Magic Leap has raised $1.4 billion, primarily from Google and the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. They got a few crumbs. “We’re trying to make science fiction real,” he said of the company’s technology.
Abovitz joined other South Florida entrepreneurs at eMerge including Randy Parker, a founder of the telehealth company MDLive in Sunrise, and Dan Cane, co-founder and CEO of Modernizing Medicine in Boca Raton, to highlight South Florida’s technology sector.
The sector has come a long way in the past decade, but is still not at the level of Silicon Valley, Boston or Seattle, entrepreneurs agree. What’s still missing, they say, is big investor interest and money, and large employers to attract the best talent.
“We’re still missing the big employers, but it’s happening,” said Manuel Medina, founder of the eMerge conference, pointing to his own new company, Cyxtera Technologies. The company already employs 1,100 people and is a $3 billion global securitytechnology firm based in Miami.
But Magic Leap — the company most point to as South Florida’s technology star — has not yet launched its first product.
Industry publications such as The Verge have been critical of the startup for its secretive nature, asserting the company is “way behind” in launching a product and that its technology may not live up to its advance billing.
South Florida ranked No. 2 in startup activity in 2016. At the two-day eMerge event concluding Tuesday, more than 100 startup companies participated in a competition, and more presented exhibits, said Xavier Gonzalez, CEO of eMerge.
Gonzalez said eMerge is marketed as a global event, rather than as a South Florida one, to attract companies and investors from Latin America and Europe.