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

Summary

Blink and you’ll 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 is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer’s presbyopia (far-sightedness). Four years into its life, Helsinki-based IXI emerged from stealth on Tuesday, announcing that it’s raised a total of $36.5 million from a list of investors that include the Amazon Alexa fund, to work towards its first commercial product. London-based VC firm Plural is leading the latest tranche of Series A funding, with participation from Tesi, byFounders, Heartcore, Eurazeo, FOV Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer, and existing investors. The startup’s previous investors, in addition to the Amazon Alexa Fund, include 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. “Eyewear is the last great frontier,” said Niko Eiden (CEO), who co-founded the company with chief algorithm officer Ville Miettinen. It is also potentially a lucrative frontier: IXI cites estimates that put the current market for eyewear at over $200 billion and growing at a rate of over 8%, faster than smartwatches and smartphones. IXI (formerly called Pixieray) is founded and staffed by a team who originally worked on groundbreaking mobile technology at Nokia that eventually was used in HoloLens at Microsoft (which had acquired a large part of Nokia). Later, the co-founders started Varjo, a mixed-reality headset developer that targets the enterprise market. VR and mixed reality, Eiden said, “continues to be super interesting […] but it’s a really hard space to be in because there is no market, and the volumes are not there.” Varjo, he added, did a “great job” of figuring out how to pivot into the niche of industrial and enterprise applications. But even with big companies like M...