Eyebot

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Founders: Matthias Hofman & Jack Moldave
Founding: 2021
Mission: Make vision care accessible to everyone, equally at the touch of a button.
Employees: 28 & 75%+ Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & ~$30M raised
Investors: General Catalyst, AlleyCorp, Baukunst, Village Global, Humba Venture, Ravelin, and Ubiquity Ventures
Key Customers: Coming Soon!

Eyebot is building a hardware enabled healthtech platform to make vision care accessible to everyone. This team is delivering high quality vision tests from standalone kiosks, without an optometrist in sight, digitizing and expanding vision care access because not everyone wins the geographic lottery.

After completing his postdoc, Co-Founder & CEO Matthias Hofman was the R&D Lead at EyeNetra, a startup attempting to solve vision testing through a mobile app based solution. But phone cameras weren’t good enough and user behavior was too erratic – lighting, distance, steadiness, etc. The technology nor the form factor were ready. So Matthias took his electrical engineering talents to Formlabs to build 3D printers, where he met Jack Moldave. 

Even a couple years later, Matthias couldn’t shake the problem. As a kid, he’d always wanted to be a pilot, but couldn’t due to his vision and the stagnancy of the eyecare industry was a perpetual frustration. Optometry hadn’t kept up with digitization. During the pandemic, he and Jack began prototyping a new device in Boston’s North End. Then they tested it in a mall before raising a Seed round led by AlleyCorp with participation from Boston firm Baukunst to build Eyebot full time. 

The global eye care market is $70B+ growing to $100B+ by 2030 (src). As the U.S. population grows, the eye doctor population is shrinking with too few doctors in too few places. Today there’s a gap of 6,000+ optometrists and growing (src). 63% of Americans lack vision insurance (src) and there is increasing evidence that myopia (nearsightedness) is consistently increasing across the world over the last 20 years (src). 

Eyebot is flipping vision care on its head. Or rather allowing us to see & solve the problem…more clearly. Only a year after their commercial launch in October 2024, they are scaling a hardware enabled software platform that lets people get a high-quality vision test from a standalone kiosk… without any appointment or human interaction. 

Eyebot’s first gen kiosk, called the S1, is designed for ultimate accessibility while administering a 90 second vision test. There’s no chin rest, no face placement, and no touching anything. All interactions are fully automated and self-adjusting, meaning the kiosk calibrates to each user rather than forcing fallible humans to adapt. They can be placed just about anywhere through cellular connections as a “plug and play” unit. Setup is easy with a base plate, power cord, and software boot. 

The Eyebot team is racing to place their first 100 kiosks (with hundreds more to follow) to expand access to vision care. They’re not trying to replace optometrists, they’re building a platform to triage and screen before someone ever steps into an eye doctor’s office. This lets human providers focus on complex care while enabling millions more people to take the first step. Eyebot’s technology is also advancing toward being able to capture high-quality images that could eventually assist doctors in identifying potential eye conditions.

One of Eyebot’s most intentional design choices is the asynchronous doctor model. Every prescription is written and reviewed by a licensed eye doctor after the kiosk intake (patient forms with current prescription use, issues & goals), visual acuity (i.e. the classic 20/20 test), and refraction measurements (light bouncing off the eye to detect spherical/cylindrical errors). That data is then sent to a remote doctor, who can review and write a prescription, without any live interaction. It’s safe, scalable, and now proven.

Prescription fees are typically $20, roughly in line with insurance copays. At the end of the vision test, users receive a doctor-signed prescription PDF via email. They can take that anywhere online or in-store. Retailers can waive the fee, which makes the experience feel free. For many Americans in rural or low-income communities who lack access to basic care, this is a massive upgrade. 

The team is also beginning to roll out their new device, the S1+, which includes support for progressive lenses, expanded ADA compliance (from wheelchair height to 7 feet tall), and enhanced visual cues for easier user onboarding. 


Eyebot’s headcount has almost doubled in 2025 and international ambitions are growing. In August they announced a $20M Series A fundraise led by General Catalyst and are making the shift from startup to scale up. Large-scale pilots are underway with some of the world’s biggest retailers & consumer brands (to be announced soon!) and the startup has conducted more than 50,000  vision tests while on track to deliver over half a million annually in 2026.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Eyebot team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

  • Coming Soon!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the major focus area(s) heading into 2026?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team and to locations across the country?
  • What is the long term vision for the company? How are you executing against it?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add over the next 12 months? Teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Eyebot you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more citizens into a better age of vision care. All humans applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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