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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<\/a> is building low-power glasses that will invisibly, automatically adjust to account for Presbyopia (far-sightedness), for the wearer.<\/p>\n Four years into its life, Hensinki-based IXI is today emerging from stealth, announcing that it\u2019s raised a total of $36.5 million from a list of investors including the Amazon Alexa fund, to work towards its first commercial product.\u00a0<\/p>\n Plural, the London-based VC, is leading the latest tranche of Series A funding, with participation also from Tesi, byFounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer and IXI\u2019s existing investors. Those previous investors, in addition to the Amazon Alexa Fund, were 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, the 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 overall at over $200 billion and growing at a rate of over 8%, faster than that of smart watches<\/a> and smartphones<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n IXI is founded and staffed by a team of people who originally worked on groundbreaking mobile technology at Nokia that eventually made its way into the HoloLens at Microsoft (which acquired a large part of the mobile phone giant at one point in its own mobile ambitions). Later, the co-founders founded and ran Varjo, the 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, with sales growing but still in the single-digit billion category, small for consumer electronics. Tellingly, Microsoft discontinued<\/a> its HoloLens in October of last year with 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, as none of them have yet to look that closely at how and if to 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 that\u2019s kind of the cool part for us,\u201d said Eiden. There are no features on the IXI glasses to check your email, post to Instagram, search for a restaurant, play a game spotting cute creatures on the street in front of you, 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 IXI has a number of patents filed and applied for around their invisibly-smart eyewear, and Eiden and his COO Jussi Havu, in an interview, 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 then automatically adjust for the wearer to be able to see items in focus.\u00a0<\/p>\n The use case, they say, is to make it easier for the growing population of consumers who currently either carry around multiple pairs of glasses for looking far and away, or up closer, to only have to have one pair; and for those who are currently using varifocals to combine multiple vision needs into one lens, to actually have glasses that are easy and useful rather than clumsy to wear.<\/p>\n Battery life is estimated to be about two days. The lenses themselves will have near-sighted prescriptions (to see things far away) built into them, so even if the battery dies if you are, say, in the middle of driving, you will not find yourself unable to see anything. It will, however, sound like if you\u2019re reading and it runs out mid-page, you\u2019re out of luck.\u00a0<\/p>\n IXI isn\u2019t the only company pursuing the idea of \u201cautofocus\u201d eyewear, although those that have hit the market already are significantly less seamless looking than what IXI (which was formerly called Pixieray) 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 for the user to see things clearly, but neither has yet to launch a product. (Laclar\u00e9e had plans to put out its first product back in 2022, a measure of how tricky it really is to get these ideas off the ground: its goalpost is now 2026.) Another Japanese company, Vixion<\/a>, has released autofocus eyewear but its devices have physical objects that look like small camera lenses embedded on them.\u00a0<\/p>\n IXI\u2019s pedigree and track record of execution are two reasons why investors are particularly keen on seeing it take a crack of the bat.\u00a0<\/p>\n Eiden said that Amazon was quick to invest in the product in part because he already knew Jeff Bezos when he was at one of his previous companies. He didn\u2019t disclose which company that was, but he said that 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 yes 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, said to 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) in its marketplace, but the company clearly sees (heh) a future where it is doing a lot more.\u00a0<\/p>\n