IXI raises $36.5M from Amazon and others to bring autofocus to prescription glasses

Blink and will miss it: A startup outside Finland takes a new look at the described glasses market. Take advantage of innovations in liquid crystal lens technology, IXI builds low -power glasses that will adapt invisible and automatically to the pre -wearer account.

Four years after her life, Helsinki -based IXI came out of Stealth on Tuesday, announcing that he raised a total of $ 36.5 million from the list of investors who include the Amazon Alexa fund, to work on its first commercial product.

London -based VC Plural is leading the latest segment of the Funds of the series A, with the participation of Tesi, BYFOUNDERS, Heartcore, Eurazeo, Fov Ventures, Tiny Supermpute and current investors. Among the former investors in the start -up, as well as the Amazon Alexa Fund, Maki.vc, the first colleague, FIRSTMINUTECAPITAL, John Lindfors, Illusian (a family office for European founders similar to Ioniq in the United States), and Bragiel Brothers.

“The glasses are the last great border,” said Niko Edin (CEO), who participated in establishing the company with the chief algorithm employee Phil Mittenn. It is also possible to be profitable limits: IXI cited estimates that set the current market for glasses with more than 200 billion dollars and grow at a rate of more than 8 %, faster than smart watches and smartphones.

IXI (which was previously called Pixiere) was established and a team was originally working on the leading mobile phone technology in Nokia that was eventually used in Hololes in Microsoft (which gained a large part of Nokia). Later, the participating founders, Varjo, a developer of the mixed headphones targeting the institution’s market.

“The virtual reality and mixed reality,” said Edin. […] But it is really difficult because there is no market, and the volumes are not present. ”

He added that Vargo did a “great job” in knowing how to mutate in the status of industrial applications and institutions. But even with the presence of major companies such as Meta, Apple, Sony and Microsoft follow-up to devices in the VR space, it was a struggle to find a prosperous market for technology-sales have increased but are still in billions of two numbers, which are small for consumer electronics. Microsoft definitely stopped Hololens last October, and she has no plans to succeed.

At IXI offer, you also leave AR and VR endeavors a lot on the table in terms of What It is treated in the glasses area. None of the previous efforts closely seen how glasses could be processed as a medical device, which is the prescription glasses.

Eden said: “There are not many trying to use technology to actually fix vision, and this is a type of great part for us,” Edin said. You cannot use IXI glasses to check your email, post to Instagram, search for a restaurant, or run a game that discovers cute creatures on the street, or get additional information about the location of the shoes that you monitored on someone’s feet. It is only more clearly visible.

IXI has submitted and submitted for a number of patents about its invisible glasses. EIIDEN and Coo Jussi Havu refused to talk about many details of the glasses, but in short, it uses a very small device built into the frame to track your eyes and corresponds to liquid crystal lenses that automatically adjust to help its wearers see the elements in focusing.

They say that the state of use is to facilitate consumers to have only one pair of glasses instead of carrying multiple pairs of glasses to look away or far away; For those who use Varifocals to get easy and useful glasses instead of wearing them.

IXI is the battery life on its glasses to be about two days. The same lenses will be built with recipes close to looking (to see things away), so even if the battery dies while you are, for example, driving, you will remain able to see them clearly. However, it seems as if you were reading and running out of the middle of the juice page, you’ll be lucky.

IXI is not the only company that follows the idea of ​​”automatic image adjustment” glasses, although those in the market already looks much smoother than IXI wants to build. Elcyo, outside Japan, and Laclaarée, in France, both imagine glasses that look like natural glasses but provide automatically to allow users to see things clearly, but neither of them has launched a product yet. Laclarée had plans to release her first product in 2022, but its goal is now 2026 – a measure of how difficult it is to get such ideas from the ground.

Another Japanese company, VIXION, has released automatic image control glasses, but its devices have material things that resemble the small camera lenses included in it.

IXI ratios and implementation record are two causes that investors are keen to see it takes the problem.

Eden said that Amazon was quickly investing in the product because he was already knew Jeff Bezos from one of his previous companies. He did not reveal the company that was, but he said that there are discussions about the Amazon that may work with the technology he made and his team.

Ultimately, these conversations did not reach anything, but they made a very fast “yes” when it comes to investing in IXI.

“The idea of ​​providing vision correction upon request to where it is needed in RX Eyewear is convincing,” Paul Bernard, who heads the Alexa box, told Techcrunch via email, citing the dismantling of current solutions.

“Automatic lighting lenses require low -energy/high -performance modification, tracking eye and algorithms on liquid crystal lenses at a very high speed. We believe that the IXI team is perfectly suitable to address these problems in light of their previous work in Varjo, where they worked on Sota’s progress in VR/XR technologies.”

Amazon currently sells readers (for a long vision) in its market, but the company clearly sees (Hey) as it can do a lot.

In November 2024, it appeared, for example, that the e -commerce giant was working on special glasses for handover drivers to help them get the parcels to their destinations faster.

These delivery glasses, if released at all, will be more in the world of mixed realistic glasses. But if you convert your attention to the growing Amazon business in areas such as the pharmacy, you can depict the company’s opportunity to take advantage of the size of the size in the production of glasses that can treat all cases of corrective vision and AR/VR.

Eden and Havo said that the technology they build had already proven in laboratories. “Later this year, you will have a chance to see the initial model,” said Havo. IXI refused to determine when it may have a ready -made product product, which will need to sell approvals as glasses, as well as everything else. “This is just the first step.”

However, with patents and other works carried out by the startup company, there is sufficient potential in IXI that deserve the investor’s interest about a very big opportunity.

Stein Tamkifi, a partner in the plural, said in a statement: “Niko, Phil and the experience of the rare European organs of the team put them at the forefront of advanced optics and eye tracking developments.” “They create a beautifully invisible technique literally tell a new approach to the vision that will finally improve human sight once and for all. By supporting IXI, we are not only investing in a company, but in the future where technology necessitates how we see the world.”