[3] Jonty Hurwitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Selwin, a hotelier and entrepreneur and Marcia Berger, a drama lecturer and teacher.

Jonty and his sister (Tamara) spent their early life living in small hotels in rural towns in South Africa while his father built up his business.

He then joined the University of Cape Town Remote Sensing Group as a full-time researcher under Professor Michael Inggs, publishing a paper on radar pattern recognition.

[citation needed] Hurwitz, in collaboration with is partner, Yifat Davidoff, produces work focuses on the aesthetics of art in the context of human perception.

[32] In 2014, Hurwitz and Davidoff worked in the field of Nanoart using multiphoton lithography[33] and photogrammetry[34] to create the world's smallest human portraits of his first love.

Smaller details of the works are at approximately the 300 nanometer scale, similar to the wavelengths of visible light and hence visualised by a scanning electron microscope.

He is also the co-founder of Claim Technology Ltd. Hurwitz arrived in London in 1995 following his travels in India and got his first job researching financial data visualization for Gilbert de Botton, Chairman and Founder of Global Asset Management (GAM).

Hurwitz left Global Asset Management after two years forming his own company, Delve, to develop the R&D in financial data visualisation.

Hurwitz's newly formed graphics and software team evolved over several years publishing several visualization projects (non-exhaustive list) like News International visual archives on the Cold War and the Industrial Revolution (1997), Biosys an environmental simulation published by Take 2 Interactive (1998) and "Oceans of Innovation" by the British Foreign Office (1998).

[37] Hurwitz joined Statpro as Creative Director where he designed the first Cloud Computing analytics and risk platform for asset data.

[38] Hurwitz was co-founding Chief Technology Officer of Wonga.com in 2007 where he designed and built the first real-time online consumer loan system in the world.

By 2011, Wonga had begun to attract criticism and Hurwitz, as the inventor of the technology, found himself with not enough influence to guide the now large company's use of his designs.