Ixi raises $36.5 million from Amazon and others to bring the concept of autofocus to prescription glasses

Blink and Your Fiss: Startups from Finland are looking at the market for formulated eyewear. Leveraging innovations in eye tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, Ixi It builds low power glasses that are invisible. This is automatically adjusted for the wearer to take presbyopia (high vision).

Four years later, Hensinki-based Ixi today has emerged from Stealth, and announced it is working on its first commercial product, raising a total of $36.5 million from a list of investors including the Amazon Alexa fund.

London-based VC Plural leads the latest tranche of Series A funding, with participation from existing investors from Tesi, Byfounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny SuperComputer and Ixi. In addition to the Amazon Alexa fund, previous investors were Maki.vc, First Fellow, First Minutecapital, John Lindfors, Illusian (the family office of European founders similar to US Iconiq) and Bragiel Brothers.

“Eyewear is the last great frontier,” said Nico Aiden, CEO who co-founded the company with Chief Algorithm Head Ville Mietttinen. Also a potentially advantageous frontier: Ixi quotes estimate This has led to the current eyewear market overall exceeding $200 billion, growing at a rate of over 8%. Smartwatch and Smartphone.

IXI was founded with a team of people who were first working on Nokia’s groundbreaking mobile technology, which eventually led Nokia to Microsoft’s Hololens (which won the majority of the mobile giants at some point in mobile ambition). The co-founders then founded and ran Varjo, a mixed reality headset developer targeted at the enterprise market.

VR and mixed reality “continue to be very interesting. But it’s a really difficult space because there’s no market and the volume isn’t there.”

Varjo added that he did a “great job” of figuring out how to pivot into the niche of industrial and enterprise applications. But even as big companies like Meta, Apple, Sony and Microsoft are pursuing hardware in the VR space, it’s tough to find a booming market for their technology. Needless to say, Microsoft Discontinued Last October, the Hololens had no plans for successors.

Ixi’s view also leaves much to the table with AR and VR pursuits what It is being addressed in the eyewear area. None of them are what prescription glasses are, as they don’t look closely at how to tackle medical devices in eyewear.

“There aren’t many people who are actually trying to use technology to fix their vision, and that’s the cool part for us,” Aiden said. Ixi Glasses do not have the ability to check emails, post on Instagram, search restaurants, find cute creatures on the streets in front of you, or get additional information about where to buy shoes you’ve found at someone’s feet. It’s just more clearly visible.

Ixi has many patents filed and filed around invisible smart eyewear. In the interview, Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu refused to talk about too many details of the glasses, but in a nutshell, they can focus on the LCD lens to track the eyes using a very small device built into the frame.

According to them, the use case is to make it easier to carry multiple pairs of glasses with you now, or carry multiple pairs of glasses because you have to only have to carry them far away or one pair. And for those currently using varifocal to combine multiple vision needs into one lens, they have glasses that are not actually clumsy and are easy and convenient.

The battery life is estimated to be approximately 2 days. The lens itself incorporates a prescription for myopia (to see things far away), so if the battery dies in the middle of driving, you will find you can’t see anything. But it sounds like you’re reading and if it runs out of middle pages, you’re not in luck.

Ixi is not the only company pursuing the idea of ​​”autofocus” eyewear, but those who have hit the market look far less seamless than what Ixi (formerly known as Pixierray) wants to build. Elcio From Japan Easy In France, we imagine eyewear that both look like regular glasses, but offer autofocus to help users see things clearly, but neither has yet to launch the product. (Lakurare had plans to release its first product in 2022. This is a measure of how difficult it is to pull these ideas off the ground. Its goal post is 2026.) Another Japanese company, Fightingreleased autofocus eyewear, but the device has physical objects that look like small camera lenses embedded in them.

Ixi’s pedigree and performance track record are two reasons why investors are particularly keen to see it take a crack in the bat.

Aiden said that Amazon invested quickly in the product because he already knew Jeff Bezos when he was in one of his previous companies. He didn’t reveal which company is which company, but he said there was a debate about Amazon, which he and his team work with the technology they’ve built.

Ultimately, these consultations never reached anything, but they were very quickly yes when it came to investment in IXI, he said.

“The idea of ​​bringing on-demand vision corrections wherever RX eyewear is needed is compelling,” told TechCrunch via email, citing the clumsiness of current solutions.

“Auto-adjusting lenses require very fast low-power/high-performance vision adjustment and algorithm adjustment to the liquid crystal lens. Given the previous issues that the IXI team worked on SOTA advancements in VR/XR technology, I think it’s a good fit to tackle these issues,” he added.

Amazon currently sells its readers (long-term) in the market, but the company clearly sees a future where (HEH) is doing more.

In November 2024, it was revealed, for example, that it was working on. Special glasses for delivery drivers To help them get parcels to their destination more quickly.

These shipping glasses will be more in the mixed reality eyewear space when launched, but if we focus on the rise in Amazon’s business in areas like pharmacies, we can imagine an opportunity to take advantage of the economies of scale of eyewear production that can address both corrective vision and AR/VR use cases.

Eiden and Havu said the technology they are building has already been proven in the lab. “We’ll have the opportunity to see the prototype later this year,” Havu said. However, IXI refused to say there could be a product ready for the market (in addition to everything else, you’ll need to sell approvals to sell as glasses). “This is just the first step.”

Still, the patents and other work it creates make it possible for IXI to deserve a very big opportunity for investors to be interested in.

“Nico, Bill and the team’s unusual European hardware expertise puts them at the forefront of advanced optics and gaze tracking development,” Plural partner Sten Tamkivi said in a statement. “They are creating beautiful, literally invisible technologies that pioneer new approaches to vision that ultimately improve human vision. By supporting Ixi, we not only invest in our company, but also become a future that revolutionizes how technology sees the world.”