Kninker and you will miss it: a startup from Finland is looking at a new look at the market for breeding notes. Use innovations in EYE tracking and liquid crystal technology, IXi Builds low power glasses that adjusts invisibly and automatically to take into account the presbyopia of a carrier.
For four years in his life, IXi, based on Tuesday, came from Stealth and announced that it collected a total of $ 36.5 million from a list of investors that include the Amazon Alexa Fund, to work on his first commercial product.
VC Firm Plural, based in London, leads the latest tranche of Series A-financing, with participation of Tesi, Byfounders, Heartcore, Euraso, FOV Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer and existing investors. The previous investors of the startup include, in addition to the Amazon Alexa Fund, Maki.vc, First Fellow, FirstmineCapital, John Lindfors, Illusian (a family office of European founders comparable to Iconiq in the US), and the Bragiel Brothers.
“Eyewear is the last major border,” said Niko Eiden (CEO), who co -founded the company with Chief Algorithm Officer Ville Miette. It is also potentially a lucrative limit: IXi quotes estimates That brought the current market for glasses with more than $ 200 billion and grew at a speed of more than 8%, faster than smartwatches And smartphones.
IXi (formerly called Pixieray) was founded and manned by a team that originally worked on groundbreaking mobile technology at Nokia that was eventually used in Hololens at Microsoft (which had acquired a large part of Nokia). Later the co-founders Varjo, a developer with mixed reality that focuses on the business market.
VR and mixed reality, Eiden said: “Stays super interesting […] But it is really a difficult space to be in because there is no market and the volumes are not there. ”
Varjo, he added, did a great job to find out how to run in the niche of industrial and business applications. But even with large companies such as Meta, Apple, Sony and Microsoft that strive for hardware in the VR room, it was a struggle to find a flourishing market for technology-the sale, but they are still in the single-digit billions, small for consumer electronics. Microsoft Hololens stopped in October and has no plans for a successor.
According to IXi, AR and VR -Opvolgingen also have a lot on the table in terms of What is tackled in the field of glasses. None of the earlier efforts looked carefully at how and whether they can tackle glasses as a medical device, that is what prescribed glasses is.
“There are really not that much that trying to use technology to actually resolve the eyesight, and that is a bit the cool part for us,” Eiden said. You cannot use the IXi glasses to check your e -mail, post it to Instagram, to search for a restaurant, play a game that spot cute beings on the street or get extra information about where you can buy the shoes you have seen on someone’s feet. It is only clearer.
IXi has submitted and applied for a number of patents around its invisibly smart glasses. Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu refused to talk about too many details of the glasses, but in a nutshell it uses a very small device built into the frame to follow your eyes and match liquid crystals that automatically adjust to help the carrier see the items in focus.
The use case, they say, is to make it easier for consumers to have only one glasses instead of wearing several spectacles to look far and away, or closer; And for those who use varifocals to have glasses that are easy and useful instead of awkward to wear.
IXi estimates that the battery life on his glasses is about two days. The lenses themselves will be built with almost visible recipes (to see things far away), so even if the battery dies while you drive, for example, you will still be able to see clearly. However, it sounds like you are reading and it runs out of the juice halfway through the page, you are out of luck.
IXI is not the only company that strives for the idea of ’autofocus’ glasses, although those who are already on the market on the market seem considerably less seamless than what IXi wants to build. Elcyofrom Japan, and LaclaréeIn France, both glasses that look like normal glasses, but offer autofocus to show users clearly, but neither of them has not yet launched a product. Laclarée had plans to release its first product in 2022, but the target post is now 2026 – a measure of how difficult it really is to get such ideas off the ground.
Another Japanese company, Vixionhas released autofocus glasses, but the devices have physical objects that look like small camera lenses that are embedded in it.
IXi’s pedigree and track record of implementation are two reasons why investors want to see it takes a crack.
Eiden said that Amazon quickly invested in the product, partly because he already knew Jeff Bezos from one of his previous companies. He did not announce which company that was, but he said there were discussions about Amazon who might work with the technology he and his teams had built.
In the end, those conversations never came to anything, but it caused a very fast “yes” when it came to investing in IXi, he said.
“The idea of bringing on-demand vision correction to where it is needed in RX glasses is mandatory,” Paul Bernard, who leads the Alexa Fund, told Techcrunch via e-mail, referring to the clumsiness of current solutions.
“Auto-tuning lenses require low-power/high-performance, eye-tracking and algorithmic adaptation to liquid crystals with a very high speed. We think that the IXI team is very suitable for tackling these problems given their earlier work at Varjo, where they worked on promoting the SOTA in Vr/X.
Amazon is currently selling readers (for the daytime) on the market, but the company clearly sees (heh) a future where it can do much more.
In November 2024, for example, it emerged that the e-commerce giant was working on Special glasses for delivery stores To help them get packages to their destinations faster.
These delivery glasses, if they were ever launched, would be more in the empire of glasses of mixed reality. But if you shift your attention to the increasing company of Amazon in areas such as Pharmacy, you can imagine an opportunity for the company to utilize economies in spectacle production that can tackle both corrective vision and AR/VR -USE cases.
Eiden and Havu said that the technology they build has already been proven in the laboratories. “Later this year you get the chance to see the prototype,” said Havu. IXi refused to say when there may be a product ready for the market, for which approvals should be sold as glasses, alongside everything else. “This is just the first step.”
Still, with the patents and other work that the startup has done, there is sufficient potential in IXi that is an investor’s interest about a very high chance.
“Niko, Ville and the rare European hardware expertise of the team brings them first to advanced optics and striking developments,” said Sten Tamkivi, a partner in plural, in a statement. “They create beautiful, literally invisible technology that peeing a new approach to vision that will finally improve human eyesight for once and for all. By supporting IXI, we not only invest in a company, but in a future in which technology revolves how we see the world.”
