Rony’s Magic Leap
Rony Abovitz co-founded MAKO Surgical, the largest supplier of surgical robotic arm assist devices for large joint recon surgery, in 2004. Stryker Corporation bought MAKO nine years later in 2013 for $1.65 billion.
Using some of the lessons from MAKO, Rony, who was 53 years old when he sold MAKO, founded Magic Leap, a mixed/augmented reality company. In 2014 Google put $540 million into Magic Leap. In 2018 a group of other venture investors (including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund) put another $1.7 billion in.
Rony describes his new system as a computing platform designed for working in open space (like surgery, for example). It is a “wearable computer that gives the user the ability to do spatial computing.”
At MAKO Rony innovated a haptic feedback loop from the robotic arm to the surgeon which gave surgeons the ability to “feel” where they were in the anatomy even though they were using a mechanical arm.
Magic Leap made feedback its central theme.
Now the computer is wearable, it senses the user with biomarkers AND maps the world around the user. Like MAKO’s haptic interface, these tools give the user context. Magic Leap’s data and images don’t just float in space. They interface literally with the physical space around the user—bookshelves, other people (a patient?), the room, desks, open spaces and so forth.
Said Rony, “Our goal was to gently slip stream into a user’s neuro anatomy the computer-generated data in a non-disrupting way. We want to talk to the visual cortex in a really biologically friendly way.”
Magic Leaps central processor, which crunches more data than a dozen smart phones, fits into the user’s pocket. The other computers are in see-through goggles the user wears.
From MAKO to Magic Leap, Rony shrank the computing box, dropped the price (Magic Leap starts at just $10k) and blasted functionality into the stratosphere.
Here’s a link which demonstrates Rony’s Magic Leap.
Eric Timko’s OrthoAlign
Eric Timko, formerly CEO of MAKO’s main competitor BlueBelt Technologies, sold BlueBelt to Smith & Nephew in 2016 for $275 million.
BlueBelt’s robotic assist device was based on Carnegie Mellon University (arguably the top computer intelligence research center in the world) technologies and its elegant software and very powerful computing power gave surgeons a lower cost, but highly functional robotic-controlled device for orthopedic procedures, particularly knee replacements.
As Timko described it, BlueBelt’s “Footprint was smaller, the cost was a third of MAKO’s, and we were open architecture, meaning we worked with all the implant companies that wanted to work with us.”
After guiding BlueBelt from development to regulatory clearance to successful commercial launch, what did Eric, 51 years old, do?
He joined California based OrthAlign, Inc.—a provider of navigation and surgical alignment tools for large joint surgeons.
As OrthAlign’s CEO, Timko’s been driving the company towards a new smart surgical assist device that is as amazing as Rony’s Magic Leap.
