Blink and you’ll miss it: A startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescription eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, IXI is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer’s presbyopia (far-sightedness).
Four years into its life, Helsinki-based IXI emerged from stealth on Tuesday, announcing that it’s raised a total of $36.5 million from a list of investors that include the Amazon Alexa fund, to work towards its first commercial product.
London-based VC firm Plural is leading the latest tranche of Series A funding, with participation from Tesi, byFounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer, and existing investors. The startup’s previous investors, in addition to the Amazon Alexa Fund, include Maki.vc, First Fellow, firstminutecapital, John Lindfors, Illusian (a family office of European founders similar to ICONIQ in the U.S.), and the Bragiel Brothers.
“Eyewear is the last great frontier,” said Niko Eiden (CEO), who co-founded the company with chief algorithm officer Ville Miettinen. It is also potentially a lucrative frontier: IXI cites estimates that put the current market for eyewear at over $200 billion and growing at a rate of over 8%, faster than smartwatches and smartphones.
IXI (formerly called Pixieray) is founded and staffed by a team who originally worked on groundbreaking mobile technology at Nokia that eventually was used in HoloLens at Microsoft (which had acquired a large part of Nokia). Later, the co-founders started Varjo, a mixed-reality headset developer that targets the enterprise market.
VR and mixed reality, Eiden said, “continues to be super interesting […] but it’s a really hard space to be in because there is no market, and the volumes are not there.”
Varjo, he added, did a “great job” of figuring out how to pivot into the niche of industrial and enterprise applications. But even with big companies like Meta, Apple, Sony and Microsoft pursuing hardware in the VR space, it’s been a struggle to find a booming market for the technology — sales have increased but they’re still in the single-digit billions, small for consumer electronics. Tellingly, Microsoft discontinued HoloLens last October, and has no plans for a successor.
In IXI’s view, AR and VR pursuits also leave a lot on the table in terms of what is being addressed in the area of eyewear. None of the previous efforts have looked closely at how and if they can tackle eyewear as a medical device, which is what prescription glasses are.
“There really aren’t that many trying to use technology to actually fix eyesight, and that’s kind of the cool part for us,” said Eiden. You can’t use the IXI glasses to check your email, post to Instagram, search for a restaurant, play a game spotting cute creatures on the street, or get additional info on where to buy the shoes you’ve spotted on someone’s feet. It’s just about seeing more clearly.
IXI has filed and applied for a number of patents around its invisibly-smart eyewear. Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu declined to talk about too many specifics of the glasses, but in a nutshell, it uses a very small device built into the frame to track your eyes and correspond with liquid crystal lenses that automatically adjust to help the wearer see the items in focus.
The use case, they say, is to make it easier for consumers to have only one pair of glasses instead of carrying multiple pairs of glasses for looking far and away, or up closer; and for those who use varifocals to have glasses that are easy and useful rather than clumsy to wear.
IXI estimates the battery life on its glasses to be about two days. The lenses themselves will be built with near-sighted prescriptions (to see things far away), so even if the battery dies while you are, say, driving, you will still be able to see clearly. However, it sounds like if you’re reading and it runs out of juice mid-page, you’ll be out of luck.
IXI isn’t the only company pursuing the idea of “autofocus” eyewear, although those already on the market look significantly less seamless than what IXI wants to build. Elcyo, out of Japan, and Laclarée, in France, both envision eyewear that look like normal glasses but provide autofocus to let users see things clearly, but neither have yet launched a product. Laclarée had plans to release its first product in 2022, but its goalpost is now 2026 — a measure of how tricky it really is to get such ideas off the ground.
Another Japanese company, Vixion, has released autofocus eyewear, but its devices have physical objects that look like small camera lenses embedded in them.
IXI’s pedigree and track record of execution are two reasons why investors are keen on seeing it take a crack at the problem.
Eiden said Amazon was quick to invest in the product partly because he already knew Jeff Bezos from one of his previous companies. He didn’t disclose which company that was, but he said there were discussions about Amazon possibly working with the technology he and his teams had built.
Ultimately, those talks never came to anything, but it made for a very quick “yes” when it came to investing in IXI, he said.
“The idea of bringing on-demand vision-correction to where it’s needed in Rx eyewear is compelling,” Paul Bernard, who heads the Alexa Fund, told TechCrunch over email, citing the clumsiness of current solutions.
“Auto-tuning lenses require low-power/high-performance, eye-tracking and algorithmic adjustment to liquid crystal lenses at very high speed. We think the IXI team is well suited to tackle these problems given their previous work at Varjo, where they worked on advancing the SOTA in VR/XR technologies,” he added.
Amazon currently sells readers (for long-sightedness) on its marketplace, but the company clearly sees (heh) a future where it can do a lot more.
In November 2024, it emerged, for example, that the e-commerce giant was working on special glasses for delivery drivers to help them get parcels to their destinations faster.
These delivery glasses, if they’re ever launched, would be more in the realm of mixed-reality eyewear. But if you shift your attention to Amazon’s increasing business in areas like pharmacy, you can envision an opportunity for the company to leverage economies of scale in eyewear production that could address both corrective vision and AR/VR use cases.
Eiden and Havu said the technology they are building has been proven already in the labs. “Later this year, you will have a chance to see the prototype,” Havu said. IXI declined to say when it might have a product ready for the market, which will need approvals to be sold as glasses, in addition to everything else. “This is just the first step.”
Still, with the patents and other work the startup has done, there is enough potential in IXI that’s merited investor interest around a very big opportunity.
“Niko, Ville and the team’s rare European hardware expertise puts them at the forefront of advanced optics and eye-tracking developments,” Sten Tamkivi, a partner at Plural, said in a statement. “They’re creating beautiful, literally invisible technology that pioneers a new approach to vision which will finally improve human eyesight once and for all. By backing IXI, we’re not just investing in a company, but in a future where technology revolutionises how we see the world.”
