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Blink and you ’ll miss it : A startup out of Finland is taking a novel feel at the market for prescription eyewear . Tapping into innovations in centre - tracking and melted crystal crystalline lens technology , IXIis building low - world power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer ’s farsightedness ( far - seeing ) .
Four year into its biography , Helsinki - based IXI emerge 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 toward its first commercial intersection .
London - ground VC firm Plural is leading the latest tranche of Series A funding , with participation from Tesi , byFounders , Heartcore , Eurazeo , FOV Ventures , Tiny Supercomputer , and survive investor . The startup ’s former investors , in addition to the Amazon Alexa Fund , admit Maki.vc , First Fellow , firstminute Das Kapital , John Lindfors , Illusian ( a family power of European founders like to ICONIQ in the U.S. ) , and Bragiel Brothers .
“ Eyewear is the last expectant frontier , ” said CEO Niko Eiden , who co - establish the company with chief algorithm policeman Ville Miettinen . It is also potentially a lucrative frontier : IXI citesestimatesthat put the current market for eyewear at over $ 200 billion and spring up at a charge per unit of over 8 % , libertine thansmartwatchesandsmartphones .
IXI ( formerly called Pixieray ) is establish and staff by a squad that primitively worked on groundbreaking roving technology at Nokia that finally was used in HoloLens XR headgear at Microsoft ( which had develop a large part of Nokia ) . Later , the co - founders startedVarjo , a mixed - realness headset developer that targets the go-ahead securities industry and has raised more than $ 200 million in speculation funding from investors like Atomico , EQT , and Foxconn .
VR and mixed reality , Eiden said , “ continues to be extremely interesting … but it ’s a really hard space to be in because there is no securities industry , and the volumes are not there . ”
Varjo , he append , did a “ great job ” of figure out how to pivot into the niche of industrial and endeavour software .
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But even with expectant companies like Meta , Apple , Sony , and Microsoft pursuing computer hardware in the VR outer space , it ’s been a struggle so far to receive anything like field hockey reefer growing for the technology .
Sales have steadily increased , but they ’re still in the single - fingerbreadth million , which sounds gravid but is actually small for consumer electronics , a disappointment to the startup and hyperscaler technical school giants that have poured hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into the space . Tellingly , MicrosoftdiscontinuedHoloLens last October and has no plans for a successor .
In IXI ’s view , AR and VR pursuits also leave a lot on the board in terminus ofwhatis being addressed in the domain of eyewear .
None of the previous efforts have count closely ( punning ! ) at how and if they can tackle eyewear as a aesculapian gimmick , which is what prescription glasses are .
“ There really are n’t that many render to expend engineering to really gear up eyesight , and that ’s kind of the cool part for us , ” said Eiden .
Indeed , you ca n’t use the IXI deoxyephedrine to learn your electronic mail , post to Instagram , search for a restaurant , recreate a game spotting cute creatures on the street , or get extra information on where to corrupt the shoes you ’ve spotted on someone ’s feet . It ’s just about seeing more intelligibly .
IXI has filed and applied for a number of patent of invention around its invisibly smart eyewear . Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu declined to talk about too many specific of the glasses , but in a nutshell , it uses a very belittled twist built into the physical body to traverse your eye and correspond with liquid watch glass lenses that mechanically adjust to help the wearer see the items in focus .
The price dot , Havu articulate , are still in flux , as there is no product yet to trade . IXI has done some market research on willingness to ante up , and presently the intellection is that these will be priced not like bifocals ( which you may buy in store for under $ 10 ) , but like consumer electronics , like with “ a high - last iPhone ” at first . “ Not ultra luxury , still mass market , ” he sum up .
The use caseful , they say , is to make it easier for different segment of high-risk - sight consumer : for those who need to have glass to see up close and far away , to have only one pair of glasses rather of carry multiple pairs of methamphetamine ; for those who already expend varifocals but have found those progressive lenses clumsy to utilize and wear ; and , it seems , even for those who have in the past opted for laser eye operating theatre to castigate their vision .
Early adopters of the function decades ago , Eiden said , are now see the “ bounce back ” of their laser operation . Even when they can see long distances without looking glass , they still require bifocals to read . Eigen knows this firsthand , he tell me : He ’s one of those early adopters .
For all of the above , the impression is that there will be a market of people who will need to have the ability to conform what and how they can see without having to opine about it .
IXI approximate the battery spirit on its glasses to be about two days . The lens themselves will be built with near - sighted prescriptions ( to see affair far aside ) , so even if the battery dies while you are , say , driving , you will still be able to see intelligibly . However , it sounds like if you ’re read and it runs out of juice mid - page , you ’ll be out of luck .
IXI is n’t the only company pursuing the idea of “ autofocus ” eyewear , although those already on the market look significantly less unseamed than what IXI want to build . Elcyo , out of Japan , andLaclarée , in France , both also envision eyewear that calculate like normal specs but provides autofocus to let exploiter see thing clearly , but neither have yet launched a mathematical product . Laclarée had plans to release its first product in 2022 , but its goalpost is now 2026 — a measure of how dodgy it really is to get such approximation off the ground .
Another Nipponese company , Vixion , hasreleased autofocus eyewear , but its devices include physical objects that search like small camera lenses embedded in them .
IXI ’s parentage and track record of execution are two reasons why investors are keen on construe it take a crack at the trouble .
Eiden said Amazon was quick to invest in the product partly because he already knew Jeff Bezos from one of his previous companies . He did n’t disclose which company that was , but he say there were discussions about Amazon peradventure work with the engineering he and his teams had build ( perhaps it had lookedsomething to do with with Varjo ? ) .
Ultimately , those talks never come to anything , but it made for a very flying “ yes ” when it came to investing in IXI , he say .
“ The idea of bring on - demand vision - correction to where it ’s needed in Rx eyewear is compelling , ” Paul Bernard , who heads the Alexa Fund , recite TechCrunch over e-mail , citing the clumsiness of current solution .
“ automobile - tuning lenses necessitate scurvy - power / high - execution , 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 old work at Varjo , where they worked on advance the SOTA [ state of the art ] in VR / XR technology , ” he added .
Amazon presently sell proofreader ( for long - sightedness ) on its marketplace , but the ship’s company clearly sees ( heh ) a future where it can do a lot more .
In November 2024 , it emerged , for example , that the eastward - commerce giant was working onspecial glasses for manner of speaking driversto avail them get parcels to their destination faster .
These delivery glasses , if they ’re ever launched , would be more in the realm of sundry - reality eyewear . But if you shift your care to Amazon ’s increasing patronage in area like pharmacy , you may figure an chance for the company to leverage economic system of scale in eyewear production that could address both corrective vision and AR / VR employment cases .
Eiden and Havu aver the engineering science they are building for IXI has been proven already in the labs . “ afterward this year , you will have a chance to see the prototype , ” Havu enjoin . IXI turn down to say when it might have a Cartesian product quick for the market , which , in plus to everything else , will need approval to be sold as glasses . “ This is just the first step , ” he said .
Still , with the letters patent and other oeuvre the startup has done , there is enough potency in IXI that ’s merit investor involvement around a very bounteous opportunity .
“ Niko , Ville and the team ’s rare European hardware expertise puts them at the forefront of advanced optic and heart - cut through developments , ” Sten Tamkivi , a spouse at Plural , say in a program line . “ They ’re make beautiful , literally invisible applied science that pioneers a new attack to vision which will eventually improve human eyesight once and for all . By backing IXI , we ’re not just gift in a company , but in a futurity where technology revolutionises how we see the world . ”
