PixelOptics plans to cash in on the huge market of the over-40 crowd.
By Andrew Kantor

 

PixelOptics, a local spin-off from the Egg Factory, scored $465,000 in funding from a California investment group this week -- money it plans to use to attract even more investment into its high-tech eyeglass lenses.

 

PixelOptics' product is "electro-active lenses," according to Ron Blum, who heads the company. Unlike conventional lenses, which only focus one way (whichever way they were ground), a PixelOptics lens changes focus depending on what the wearer is looking at, in milliseconds.

 

The electro-active technology has a variety of uses, from eyeglasses to the canopies of fighter jets to automotive mirrors. But the first market is for people suffering from presbyopia, a condition affecting most people over 40.

 

With presbyopia, a person's eyes can no longer focus at nearby objects well, and the result is farsightedness. Most people get bifocals or progressive lenses, but those are only a compromise. They're fine if the nearby object is low, but if it's straight ahead, like a computer monitor, bifocal wearers have to tilt their heads back or look over the lenses.

 

PixelOptics lenses make everything from the newspaper on the table to the computer monitor to the mountain in the distance in focus, all the time. No more head-tilting.

 

With "93 percent of everybody in the world over the age of 42 [being] presbyoptic," according to Blum, the potential market is huge. PixelOptics plans to cash in on it.

 

It's owned by eVision, which was itself spun out of the Egg Factory, a Roanoke company founded by Blum that "creates and develops significant innovations." Johnson & Johnson invested in eVision in 2001, licensing its technology and putting money and research into it.

 

In September, just after J&J sold its Roanoke-based Spectacle Lens Group, it returned the rights to the lens technology to eVision. It even went further, selling eVision all the improvements J&J had made to the technology, and licensed the intellectual property related to them.

 

In other words, eVision got back its technology -- and more.

 

It then started looking for other sources of funding. Venture capital firms interested in medical devices were an obvious choice, but the technology could be used for so much more -- those fighter-plane canopies and car mirrors, for example.

 

So it spun out a separate company, PixelOptics, to which it licensed all the eyewear possibilities, including glasses, contact lenses and even lens implants.

 

This gives PixelOptics a clear focus -- pun intended -- that it can sell to potential investors.

Life Sciences Angels is one of them. Founded in 2004 in Palo Alto, Calif., it invests in early-stage biotech and medical device companies.

 

Calling PixelOptics "a technology that could put Roanoke on the map," Anne DeGheest, who runs her own investment firm but also works with LSA, said she sees a lot of commercial potential in the technology.

 

"I've had the opportunity to find companies in the early stages that have become billion-dollar companies," she said. "I think PixelOptics could be like that."

 

One of the attractions is that PixelOptics is well past the early stages. As Blum put it, "It's fair to say that most of the invention is behind us. We've climbed most of the major mountains. I would characterize the rest as hills."

 

"They've proven that the technology can work," DeGheest agreed. "It's a matter of putting it into a fashionable frame that people will be willing to wear."

 

In these days of multimillion-dollar investments, a mere $465,000 may seem like pocket change. But it serves a specific purpose: Like priming an engine, that cash is designed to make PixelOptics more attractive to other investors -- those with deeper pockets.

 

"This helps us with operational expenses until the institutional venture-capital round comes," Blum explained. "It will move us forward significantly."

 

Forward toward Blum's longer-term goal: to get the funding necessary to open research and sales offices in Roanoke and on the West Coast.

 

"We anticipate that once we have raised the next round of capital -- and we hope to be able to do that prior to the end of the year -- we anticipate having a Roanoke, Virginia office and a La Jolla, California office," Blum said.

 

The company's headquarters and business group will be in Roanoke, according to Blum, and research would be done here as well as in La Jolla, taking advantage of what Blum called the world-class optics expertise at the nearby University of California, San Diego.

 

Blum declined to estimate how long it might take his product to reach retail stores.

 

Yet neither Blum nor DeGheest seemed concerned about demand.

 

"There were 18 to 20 million pairs of progressive lenses sold in the U.S. just last year," Blum said.

DeGheest sees even more potential. "There are ... millions of Americans that could probably wear this product," she said. "It is a traumatic, life-changing experience to have to use progressive lenses."