{"id":666019,"date":"2025-04-29T10:40:17","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T07:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/ixi-raises-36-5m-from-amazon-and-others-to-bring-autofocus-to-prescription-glasses\/"},"modified":"2025-04-29T10:40:17","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T07:40:17","slug":"ixi-raises-36-5m-from-amazon-and-others-to-bring-autofocus-to-prescription-glasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/ixi-raises-36-5m-from-amazon-and-others-to-bring-autofocus-to-prescription-glasses\/","title":{"rendered":"IXI raises $36.5M from Amazon and others to bring autofocus to prescription glasses"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Blink and you\u2019ll miss it: A startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescript<\/a>ion eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology<\/a>, IXI<\/a> is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer\u2019s presbyopia (far-sightedness).<\/p>\n

Four years into its life, Helsinki-based IXI emerged from stealth on Tuesday, announcing that it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

London-based VC firm Plural is leading the latest tranche of Series<\/a> A funding, with participation from Tesi, byFounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer, and existing investors. The startup\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEyewear is the last great frontier,\u201d 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<\/a> that put the current market for eyewear at over $200 billion and growing at a rate of over 8%, faster than smartwatches<\/a> and smartphones<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

VR and mixed reality, Eiden said, \u201ccontinues to be super interesting [\u2026] but it\u2019s a really hard space to be in because there is no market, and the volumes are not there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Varjo, he added, did a \u201cgreat job\u201d 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\u2019s been a struggle to find a booming market for the technology \u2014 sales have increased but they\u2019re still in the single-digit billions, small for consumer electronics. Tellingly, Microsoft discontinued HoloLens last October, and has no plans for a successor.<\/p>\n

In IXI\u2019s view, AR and VR pursuits also leave a lot on the table in terms of what <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere really aren\u2019t that many trying to use technology to actually fix eyesight, and that\u2019s kind of the cool part for us,\u201d said Eiden. You can\u2019t use the IXI glasses to check your email, post to Instagram, search for a restaurant, play a game<\/a> spotting cute creatures on the street, or get additional info on where to buy the shoes you\u2019ve spotted on someone\u2019s feet. It\u2019s just about seeing more clearly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re reading and it runs out of juice mid-page, you\u2019ll be out of luck.\u00a0<\/p>\n

IXI isn\u2019t the only company pursuing the idea of \u201cautofocus\u201d eyewear, although those already on the market look significantly less seamless than what IXI wants to build. Elcyo<\/a>, out of Japan, and Laclar\u00e9e<\/a>, 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. Laclar\u00e9e had plans to release its first product in 2022, but its goalpost is now 2026 \u2014 a measure of how tricky it really is to get such ideas off the ground. <\/p>\n

Another Japanese company, Vixion<\/a>, has released autofocus eyewear, but its devices have physical objects that look like small camera lenses embedded in them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

IXI\u2019s pedigree and track record of execution are two reasons why investors are keen on seeing it take a crack at the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t disclose which company that was, but he said there were discussions about Amazon possibly working with the technology he and his teams had built.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ultimately, those talks never came to anything, but it made for a very quick \u201cyes\u201d when it came to investing in IXI, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of bringing on-demand vision-correction to where it\u2019s needed in Rx eyewear is compelling,\u201d Paul Bernard, who heads the Alexa Fund, told TechCrunch over email, citing the clumsiness of current solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAuto-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,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In November 2024, it emerged, for example, that the e-commerce giant was working on special glasses for delivery drivers<\/a> to help them get parcels to their destinations faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These delivery glasses, if they\u2019re ever launched, would be more in the realm of mixed-reality eyewear. But if you shift your attention to Amazon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Eiden and Havu said the technology they are building has been proven already in the labs. \u201cLater this year, you will have a chance to see the prototype,\u201d 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. \u201cThis is just the first step.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, with the patents and other work the startup has done, there is enough potential in IXI that\u2019s merited investor interest around a very big opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cNiko, Ville and the team\u2019s rare European hardware expertise puts them at the forefront of advanced optics and eye-tracking developments,\u201d Sten Tamkivi, a partner at Plural, said in a statement. \u201cThey\u2019re 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\u2019re not just investing in a company, but in a future where technology revolutionises how we see the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Blink and you\u2019ll 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\u2019s presbyopia (far-sightedness). Four years into its life, Helsinki-based…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":666020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/IXI_14_low-res.jpg?resize=1200,800","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[155980,155981,151516,28340,123135,74839,73736,52711,155982,77190,155983,147314,101018],"class_list":["post-666019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-alexa-fund","tag-amazon-alexa-fund","tag-biotech-health","tag-europe","tag-eyewear","tag-fundraising","tag-gadgets","tag-hardware","tag-ixi","tag-nokia","tag-pixieray","tag-varjo","tag-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}