Robert Masson

In early 2024, Masson did something no surgeon had done before. He brought the Apple Vision Pro into the operating room - not as a gadget, not as a toy, but as a working logistics tool. During spine reconstruction cases, his team accessed holographic, touch-free setup guides and procedural maps floating inside the sterile field. No screens to lean toward. No paper to flip. Just instructions hovering exactly where the work happens. It was, by every account, a world first.

He is careful about what that means. eXeX never intended to turn a consumer headset into a regulated medical device. The point was different and quieter: prove that spatial computing could organize a surgical team so completely that the technology disappears. As Masson put it, the system is invisible to him in the moment - all he feels is the unusual stillness of a team that already knows what comes next.

From the scalpel to the software

Masson did not arrive at this from a startup garage. He arrived from inside the operating room, after more than three decades and 13,000-plus microsurgical spine procedures. He founded the Masson Spine Institute in Orlando in 1999, became an internationally recognized name in minimally invasive spine surgery, invented the iMAS 360 lumbar reconstruction platform, and trained over 1,500 surgeons. He holds more than a dozen patents. He built Florida's first JCAHO Spine Center of Excellence.

All of that is the raw material for eXeX. The thesis is simple to say and hard to do: mastery should not retire when the master does. So the company builds a digital twin of a surgery - the choreography, the instrument sequence, the spatial setup - and then delivers it back as guidance any qualified team can follow. Surgical mastery, captured and made portable.

The motivation is personal. Masson talks about competition and performance the way some people talk about oxygen. Then he describes the company in exactly those terms: take everything he knows about competing at the highest level, put it on steroids, and build a scalable software system powered by AI to deliver it. The OR, in his telling, is just the most demanding arena he has ever competed in.

The astronaut who became a surgeon

The story behind the story is stranger than the resume. Masson grew up in Los Angeles, a first-generation American raised in what he describes as a difficult family environment. His grandfather was a WWII fighter test pilot and an original Gates Flying Circus aviator, and that lineage pointed young Robert at the sky. He wanted to be an astronaut. He went to the University of Florida on a football scholarship and started in aerospace engineering, aiming for the stars.

Then the Challenger broke apart over Florida in 1986, and the trajectory bent. He moved into biomedical engineering, completed a seven-year BS/MD program, did stem cell research on spinal cord repair, and trained as a neurosurgeon. The frontier he chose was not above the atmosphere. It was inside the human spine - and, eventually, inside the operating room itself.

Comfortable being uncomfortable

If there is a family motto, it is that one. Masson and his wife Denise - whom he met at a Chili's happy hour in Gainesville - raised five children inside a culture of relentless, friendly competition. He frames it as a feature, not a quirk: a family that is uncomfortable with being comfortable.

He proves it in unlikely ways. At 52, an age when most people are easing off the throttle, Masson joined a young-driver race development program and started competing in motorsport. In 2019 he finished second in the LMP2 class at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, one of the most punishing endurance races in the world - racing alongside his eldest son, Kyle. He called it a metaphor: chasing his firstborn around a racetrack, the family competitive streak made literal at 180 miles an hour.

That is the throughline. Whether it is a spine, a race car, or a software platform, Masson is drawn to high-stakes systems where excellence is measured in milliseconds and there is no room to improvise. eXeX is the place where all three obsessions - medicine, performance, and engineering - finally converge.

The bet on the Surgical Metaverse

eXeX calls its ambition the Surgical Metaverse, and underneath the phrase is a practical idea: every operating room should be able to run with the precision of the very best ones. The platform has already been used in more than 1,000 surgeries across alpha test sites in the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2024 the company raised seed funding, with reported total funding of $5.8 million, to push the vision further.

For all the futuristic packaging, Masson's pitch lands as something almost humble. He is not promising robots or replacement. He is promising calm - the boring, beautiful kind of calm that comes when a team never has to wonder what happens next. After 35 years inside the work, he decided the most radical thing he could build was an operating room that simply, reliably, works.

Why a surgeon, of all people, builds software

There is a particular kind of founder who only shows up after a full career somewhere else, and Masson is the type. He spent decades watching brilliant teams lose minutes to small frictions - the wrong tray, the missing step, the silent moment where someone is not quite sure what comes next. Most surgeons accept that as the texture of the job. Masson treated it as a bug to be engineered out. The result is a company that does not start from a piece of technology looking for a use, but from a problem he had personally lived 13,000 times.

That sequencing matters. eXeX does not ask surgeons to trust a black box; it asks them to trust a colleague who has stood exactly where they stand. When Masson describes the platform delivering holographic guidance and maps that improve a team's spatial and temporal orientation, he is not reciting a spec sheet. He is describing the exact help he wished he had on the hardest cases of his own career.

The connections behind the company

His credibility opened doors that a typical software founder would have to spend years prying. Across his time in Orlando he has treated hundreds of elite athletes and Olympians, built a referral network that spans continents, and trained a generation of surgeons who now run their own programs. Those relationships became eXeX's earliest alpha sites - the surgeons who agreed to test holographic guidance in live cases across the United States and the United Kingdom did so because they already knew the name behind it.

It is also why the Apple Vision Pro milestone resonated beyond the medical press. A consumer headset is easy to dismiss as hype. A consumer headset, used as a serious logistics tool by a neurosurgeon with three decades of patents and a podium at Daytona, is harder to wave away. Masson has spent his whole life collecting the kind of proof that makes skeptics pause - and then using it to push the next idea through.