Magic Leap today announced the appointment of Ross Rosenberg, an experienced technology executive, as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer, effective November 1. Rosenberg will succeed Peggy Johnson, who is stepping down as the Company completes its pivot to the enterprise and moves toward expanding commercial adoption of its Augmented Reality (AR) platform technology.
Rosenberg is a seasoned operating, strategy, and marketing executive with extensive experience in executing transformational growth strategies in enterprise and industrial technology companies, such as Bain Capital (software portfolio), Danaher, First Solar and Belden. In these leadership roles, he has led the launch, development and acquisition of new technologies, products and services that drive innovation velocity, productivity and insight for customers in their most mission-critical use cases.
With the enterprise Augmented Reality market beginning to coalesce around a core set of use cases and verticals, Rosenberg will focus the next phase of Magic Leap’s evolution around solving for the needs and challenges of its target customers.
“As companies begin to see true ROI from deploying AR technologies, there is now a clear need state that Magic Leap is capable of solving for,” said Ross Rosenberg, Magic Leap’s incoming CEO. “I am incredibly excited to begin working with the world class team at Magic Leap and want to thank Peggy for her leadership in guiding the company through a critical phase of its development.”
Johnson assumed the role of CEO in August 2020 with a mission to bring Magic Leap’s transformative technology to the enterprise, with a focus on designing, manufacturing, and launching Magic Leap 2, the most advanced AR technology for business.
In her time at Magic Leap, Johnson, with the help and hard work of the company’s executive leadership and incredibly talented employees, has positioned Magic Leap for its next phase of success including stabilizing the company, launching Magic Leap 2, and establishing Magic Leap as a technology leader in enterprise AR. As a result, Magic Leap has secured collaborations with some of the biggest players in technology including Nvidia, AMD, and Cisco, as well as licensing and contract manufacturing agreements with large technology companies.
“Having accomplished so much of what I set out to do at Magic Leap, I felt the time had come to transition leadership to a new CEO who can guide the company through its next period of growth,” explained Johnson. “I’m incredibly proud of the leadership team we’ve built at Magic Leap and want to sincerely thank all of the employees for their work in helping to successfully reorient the company to the enterprise market.”
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About Ross Rosenberg
Rosenberg has served in senior executive leadership roles in private and public technology companies, including Bain Capital (software portfolio), Danaher, First Solar and Belden. In these roles, he has led the launch, development and acquisition of new technologies, products and services that drive innovation velocity, productivity and insight for enterprise customers in their most mission-critical use cases.
Most recently, Rosenberg served as an operating executive in Bain Capital’s software portfolio, where he helped lead the transformation at Rocket Software, a large-scale enterprise IT software company. Through this transformation, the company integrated processes, systems, infrastructure and teams across more than $1 billion of software acquisitions, accelerated revenue and EBITDA growth, increased recurring revenue and net retention, diversified sales channels and expanded into hybrid cloud, data management and application development products.
Prior to Bain Capital, Rosenberg was a senior executive at Belden, Inc. (NYSE: BDC), a $3 billion global industrial technology company providing communications infrastructure, networking hardware and software in industrial automation, energy, transportation, media and “smart building” applications. At Belden, Rosenberg drove innovation and organic growth initiatives, including building and leading the company’s “incubator” program, as well as the company's strategic planning, M&A and operational integration functions for newly acquired businesses.
Prior to joining Belden, Ross led Global Marketing, Strategy and Corporate Development at First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR), the largest provider of utility-scale solar power plant solutions. During Ross’s tenure, revenues grew from $500 million to $4 billion. Under Ross’ leadership, First Solar completed multiple acquisitions, several joint ventures and corporate venture capital investments in strategic partners, deploying $1 billion of invested capital which resulted in the development, construction and financing of the largest utility-scale solar project pipeline in the world and the expansion of the company's capabilities from manufacturing to engineering, procurement and construction, project development and software-based power plant operation and remote maintenance/predictive analytics.
Prior to First Solar, Ross ran a $500 million division of Danaher (NYSE: DHR), a $30+ billion diversified industrial technology company. At Danaher, Ross held several executive management roles including operating/P&L responsibility for a global industrial automation business. Under Ross’s leadership, the business improved its revenue growth rate from -3% to 11% and grew operating profit 14% year over year via the development and launch of one of the fastest growing and most profitable new product lines in company history. This transformation resulted in higher recurring revenue and increased gross margins. At Danaher, Ross also served as Vice President, Marketing for a $1 billion division and Group Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, where he executed several billion dollars of acquisitions.
Prior to Danaher, Ross led corporate development at Zebra Technologies, where he founded and built the M&A function and led the company’s growth in warehouse logistics technology and expansion into radio frequency identification (“RFID”) technology.
Ross was an investment banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions group at Merrill Lynch and started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers where he conducted buy-side due diligence and valuation for corporate and private equity clients. Ross holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Accounting (and CPA) from University of Illinois.
