Blink and Your Fiss: Startups from Finland are looking at the market for formulated eyewear. IXI leverages innovations in eye tracking and LCD lens technology to build low-power glasses that visibly and automatically adjust to take into account the wearer’s elders (high-sightedness).
Four years later, Helsinki-based IXI emerged from stealth on Tuesday, raising a total of $36.5 million from a list of investors including the Amazon Alexa fund, and announced it would work on its first commercial product.
London-based VC Firm Plural leads the latest Series A tranches with participation from Tesi, Byfounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny SuperComputer and existing investors. Previous investors in the startup include Maki.vc, First Fellow, First Minutecatial, John Lindfors, Illusian (the family office of European founders similar to US Iconiq), and the Braziel brothers.
“Eyewear is the last great frontier,” said Nico Aiden. It is also a potentially advantageous frontier. Ixi estimates it will grow the current market for eyewear by more than $200 billion, at over 8% faster than smartwatches and smartphones.
IXI (formerly known as Pixierray) was founded at Nokia, where a team was eventually working on Nokia’s groundbreaking mobile technology, created staff, and eventually used by Microsoft (which acquired most of Nokia). The co-founders then launched Varjo, a mixed reality headset developer aimed at the enterprise market, raising more than $200 million in venture capital from investors such as Atomico, EQT and Foxconn.
VR and mixed reality, Eiden said: […] But it’s a really difficult space as there is no market and the volume is not 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, finding something like hockey stick growth for this technology has been struggling so far.
Sales are steadily increasing, but they are still in single-digit billions of dollars, which sounds big, but in reality they are disappointed with home appliances, startups and hyperschool tech giants. Needless to say, Microsoft canceled Hololens last October and has no plans for a successor.
In IXI’s view, AR and VR tracking leaves a lot on the table in terms of what is being addressed in the eyewear area.
None of my previous efforts have seen closely whether they could work on the perfect medical device for glasses (pun!).
“There aren’t a lot of people who actually try to use technology to fix their vision, and that’s the cool part for us,” Aiden said.
Certainly, you won’t be able to use ixi glasses to check your email, post on Instagram, search restaurants, play games where you can find cute creatures on the streets, or get additional information about where you can buy shoes you’ve found at someone’s feet. It’s just more clearly visible.
IXI has filed and filed many patents around invisible smart eyewear. Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu refused to talk about how there were too many details about the glasses, but in simple terms it corresponds to LCD lenses that use a very small device built into the frame to track the eyes and automatically adjust to help the wearer focus and view the items.
According to Havu, the price range is still in fluid form as there are no products to sell yet. IXI is doing market research on willingness to pay and believes that these are not just beforecal (which can be purchased in the shop for under $10) and are initially priced rather than home appliances comparable to “high-end iPhones.” “Ultra luxury isn’t a mass market yet,” he added.
The use case is to facilitate different segments of worsening consumers. For those who need to use glasses to see close and far, instead of carrying multiple glasses, it’s important to have only one glasses. For those who already use varifocals but have discovered that those progressive lenses wear out clumsy. And that’s true for those who have previously opted for laser eye surgery to correct their vision.
Decades ago, early adopters of the procedure said they were currently watching “bouncebacks” of laser surgery. Even if you could look at long distances without glasses, they still need difocals to read. Indigenous knows this firsthand, he told me: he is one of those early adopters.
All of the above is the belief that there is a market for people who want to have the ability to adjust how they can see without thinking about it.
IXI estimates the battery life of the glasses is about two days. The lens itself is constructed with a prescription for myopia (to see things far away). Therefore, if the battery dies while driving, you can still see clearly. But if you’re reading and it runs out of juice halfway through the page, you seem unlucky.
Ixi is not the only company pursuing the idea of ”autofocus” eyewear, but those already on the market look far less seamless than what IXI want to build. Both Elcio and Lakurare, who are from Japan in France, also envision eyewear that look like regular glasses, but offer autofocus that allows users to see things clearly but has yet to launch a product. Lakurare had plans to release its first product in 2022, but its goal post is now in 2026. This is a measure of how difficult it is to pull such an idea off the ground.
Another Japanese company, Vixion, has released autofocus eyewear, but the device contains physical objects that look like small camera lenses embedded in them.
IXI’s pedigree and performance track record are two reasons why investors are keen to see them take a crack in the problem.
Eiden said that Amazon already knew Jeff Bezos from one of its previous companies, so it quickly invested in the product. He didn’t reveal which company was which, but he said there was a debate about Amazon, which he and his team worked with the technology he built (maybe it had something to do with Varjo?).
Ultimately, these talks never happened to anything, but they ended up being a very quick “yes” when it comes to investing in IXI, he said.
“The idea of bringing on-demand vision correction where RX eyewear is needed is convincing,” emailed TechCrunch to TechCrunch, citing the clumsiness of current solutions.
“Auto-adjusting lenses require very fast low power/high performance to the LCD lens, eye tracking and algorithm adjustment. I think the IXI team is a good fit to tackle these issues given their previous work with Varjo. [state of the art] With VR/XR technology,” he added.
Amazon currently sells its readers (long-term) in its market, but the company has a clear view of a future where it can do more.
It became clear in November 2024, for example, that the e-commerce giant would work on special glasses for delivery drivers to help them reach their destination faster.
These shipping glasses will be more in the realm of mixed reality eyewear if they are fired. But if we focus on the growing business of Amazon in areas like pharmacies, we can imagine an opportunity to leverage economies of scale in eyewear production that can address both corrective vision and AR/VR use cases.
Eiden and Havu said the technology they are building for IXI has already been proven in the lab. “We’ll have the opportunity to see the prototype later this year,” Havu said. IXI refused to say that there could always be a product ready for the market. “This is just the first step,” he said.
Still, the patents and other work done by the startups have enough potential for IXI to deserve the interest of investors around a very large opportunity.
“Nico, Bill and the team’s rare European hardware expertise puts them at the forefront of advanced optics and gaze tracking development,” Sten Tamkivi, multiple partner, 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.”
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