Envision seeks a partner to keep its smart glasses for the visually impaired alive

For someone with low vision, using a phone to read a sign can mean holding a camera in one hand and a cane in the other. Envision built smart glasses to ease that burden. Now the Netherlands-based start-up faces a different obstacle: it has not found a profitable business model and plans to stop product development at year-end unless it secures a partner, according to The National — Business.

In a statement published on the company’s website on Monday, founders Karthik Mahadevan and Karthik Kannan outlined plans to wind down operations. They said they had taken Envision as far as they could with their small-scale efforts. The product still had room to grow, they argued, but needed someone able to pursue a different audience or business model. Talks were under way with several potential partners, and the founders invited other proposals.

A large need, a small paying market

The central difficulty, the founders said, was turning Envision into a business that could sustain itself while facing competition from Apple and Meta and pressures from the current economy. They pointed to a gap between the apparent size of the market and the number of people able to pay. Around 300 million people are blind or have low vision, they wrote, but many face poverty, unemployment and limited access to basic services before technology becomes a priority.

A large population of potential users does not translate into a large paying market, Envision’s founders said.

Even cheap or free products struggle to move beyond a million users, the founders said, with paying customers accounting for a much smaller group. Their assessment puts the company’s predicament in plain terms: a tool can address a real daily difficulty without reaching enough buyers to support the business behind it.

From a phone camera to smart glasses

Envision’s path towards glasses began in 2017, as its Envision AI smartphone app gained popularity. The app uses a phone’s camera to recognise and read signs, menus, books, objects and other material in real time. Kannan told The National in 2024 that feedback from users of the free version helped push the company towards a less cumbersome alternative. The app won a Google Play Award for best accessibility experience in 2019.

The glasses arrived in 2020, with prices ranging from $1,899 to $3,499, and received improvements during the artificial intelligence boom. The aim was to bring the app’s most useful features into a wearable product. Kannan had also described the prospect of an agreement with Google to use its largely defunct Google Glass technology.

The business had ambitions in the Middle East, too. In 2024, Envision told The National it intended to focus on Arabic. Kannan said a growing regional user community had encouraged the company to move more work in-house, giving it greater control over how its artificial intelligence handled scanned documents and written text on blackboards.

The immediate question is whether the partner discussions produce a way forward. The founders promised a final update and said they hoped to keep the app and some other offerings working without an internet connection for as long as possible. For users, that leaves both the company’s future and the longevity of its tools dependent on what comes next.