This morning EyeQue, maker of at home visual acuity tests, scored $11.2 million in its second funding round. This latest financing brings the company's total funding to $16.2 million.
“The funding is going to be used to increase product development,” John Serri, cofounder and chief technology officer, told MobiHealthNews. “We have an interesting headline of new products coming out based on various tests methods that we have and IP that we have generated.”
Although Serri said he couldn't go into details about the new products, he told MobiHealthNews that the public could expect improvement on his company's refraction testing products and easy-to-use personal vision trackers.
The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Newark, California. But the startup initially deployed its first refraction device in January of 2017. More recently, the company launched the EyeQue Insight visual acuity screener, an at-home visual acuity test that looks like a VR headset and attaches to the users’ smartphone, in March.
“EyeQue is really about providing at-home vision tests for consumers,” Serri said. “It is an interesting and revolutionary technology that can be used by people to help them understand their eyes.”
The platform doesn’t offer a prescription for corrective lenses since a full prescription needs to be written by a licensed practitioner. Instead, the company offers a refractive number that correlates to a level of vision.
Right now EyeQue's products are FDA registered as Class 1 devices, however the products haven’t gone through the pre-market clearance process that would be required for Class 2. Since the company offers refractive numbers and not prescriptions, its device doesn’t fall under the category for which FDA requires further regulation, Serri told MobiHealthNews in March. However, a similar product, Opternative’s smartphone-based eye exam, was recently warned by the FDA that it needed to seek Class 2 clearance.
“This is not an eye health exam," Serri said. "It is a measurement of the eye but we recommend that people go visit the eye doctor, and the eye doctor checks on things like glaucoma."
In the future Serri said that the startup would like to see its product impacting not just Americans, but people all over the world.
“At-home vision testing has the potential to dramatically improve the well-being of millions of people worldwide,” Tibor Laczay, cofounder and CEO of EyeQue, said in a statement. “Over 2.5 billion people across the globe need glasses and don’t have them — whether they don’t have access to solutions, can’t afford them, or may not even realize their vision is impaired due to lack of healthcare services. At-home vision testing is more necessary than ever, and this round of financing will enable us to further pursue our dream of making vision care accessible and affordable to everyone.”
