AAO Congress, Orlando 2025

Our CEO Reed Foster traveled to Orlando for the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s annual congress, one of the largest gatherings of eye care professionals in the world. Held at the Orange County Convention Center from October 17 to 20, 2025, the event brought together thousands of ophthalmologists, researchers, and industry leaders from across the globe. It was the ideal setting to introduce Autofocals to an audience uniquely positioned to understand and champion the technology.

Over the course of the congress, Reed met with many of the most respected and forward-thinking specialists in the field. Going beyond typical conference networking, these meetings turned into substantive exchanges with clinicians and researchers actively shaping the future of vision care. The enthusiasm for Autofocals among this community reflected both the strength of the product and the appetite for genuine innovation in how we correct and enhance human sight.

Out of the relationships built in Orlando, we have secured several of our most valuable partners for piloting Autofocals, giving us direct access to the clinical expertise and real-world testing environments we need to move forward with confidence. Building on that momentum, we will certainly attend the 2026 congress as well, continuing to deepen these partnerships and expand our presence within the global eye care community.

Las Vegas Vision Expo 2025

The Vision Expo West stands out in the eyecare and eyewear space as a comprehensive world-class event for eyecare professionals, including optometrists, opticians, and ophthalmologists, to explore the latest trends, technologies, and products in the optical industry.

We exhibited our latest generation of Autofocals® to a super-enthusiastic audience and got overwhelming support from key stakeholders in the vision health value chain. We also met some amazing forward-thinking optos interested in distributing Autofocals® as soon as we hit the market, which gave us another layer of validation as we approach the final stretch.

What made us extremely happy is that almost everyone who stopped by our stand came back and brought a friend or a colleague who wanted to try our glasses. The emotional response people get when their visual acuity is restored is what keeps us motivated and is a huge reward for our team every time.

Exhibiting at the Vision Expo West 2025 was one of our major milestones in 2025, along with making our glasses fully cordless and autonomous by integrating the battery into a slick new frame with improved ergonomics. We’re now moving forward with our roadshow as we onboard new partners, investors and future users.

Our next stop: the American Academy of Ophthalmology congress in Orlando, Florida!

Demo day in Belgrade

Despite the summer heat and a slew of logistical barriers, we hosted 70 people in the offices of the Digital Serbia Initiative in Belgrade for a fully packed demo day. The theme was “bring your parents to try Autofocals®”, and we had a blast demoing for a crowd of people aged 55+. They are the demographic which suffers the most because of presbyopia, and we wanted to show them that they can reclaim their vision and see as clearly as they could back when they were in their 20s.

What was almost as precious as the reactions of our testers were the reactions of their children, who could see how their parents responded when they once again experienced instant visual clarity and sharp, focused vision across multiple distances.

We started our mission with the idea to make technology which supplements biology. To help us reclaim what nature has slowly taken away from us over the decades. For people 40-55, our glasses are a great boon. They make visually demanding tasks easier. However, for people 60+, our glasses are an absolute necessity. For them, it’s the difference between being able and being completely unable. We want to turn age into an ability. This is why we’re here.

Demo day in New York City

Our demo day in New York City brought together a blend of enthusiasts, explorers and early supporters who had already made their preorders (without seeing the product!), which put additional pressure on our team to give them a good demo experience.

Our CEO, Reed Foster, demoed relentlessly for several hours and the audience appreciated it–the ones who had already preordered were very happy with what they saw, and some of the people who came out of curiosity ended up preordering as well.

After this demo day, we started establishing contact with potential opto partners in the NYC metro area. Our plan is to grow this network over the next couple of months and prepare the necessary infrastructure for delivering our first units in 2026.

Gitex Berlin product showcase

Gitex Europe 2025 (held in Berlin) represents the first European outing for the now globally recognized Gitex brand, a massive expo-style undertaking focused on promoting tech innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment opportunities.

We ran a non-stop demo train for curious expo attendees over the entire course of the event, while using what little breathing room we had between demo sessions to meet potential investors and partners from Europe and Asia.

The breakneck pace ultimately paid off, as we secured one of Austria’s most interesting angel investors and opened several channels to potential manufacturers, distributors and soft landing partners for Germany and Japan.

Demo day in San Francisco

We first met Doctor Clifford Lee in January 2025 when we took our Autofocals® for a brief US roadshow, with the primary goal of meeting visionary optometrists who would be ready to join us as distribution partners.

What immediately set Clifford apart from the rest was that he had already tried several competing solutions and was thus the perfect candidate to offer an unbiased comparison. We’ll let the fact that he set up a demo day with us and brought his patients to try Autofocals® speak for itself.

We’ll most certainly organize follow-up events with the Lees, as they’ve proven to be tremendous hosts and true visionaries in the eyecare industry. Our plan is to synchronize these demo days with the new model which we plan to develop by the end of the year.

Demo day in Bend

We organized an amazing demo day in Bend, Oregon, in partnership with Jason Dimmig MD. Jason is a world-class cataract and glaucoma surgery specialist and one of the members of the Himalayan Cataract Project, and he’s been a staunch supporter of our cause since the early days.

We were thrilled to demo first for his clinic’s staff and then for Jason’s patients, which also gave us some of our first preorders.

We believe finding the right partners to take this product to market is crucial, and people like Jason just seem to see the future of eyewear better than others.

Web Summit Lisbon 2024

Web Summit gathers some of the best talent in tech & startup world and connects them to investors, partners, and consumers from across the globe. Top-notch speakers, rapid matchmaking, and people eager to see what the tech world has to offer: seemed like a great setup for us to demo to dozens of folks we’ve never seen before.

We used this opportunity to stress-test our demo kit, see how it behaves in an environment over which we had almost no control, and get valuable data points to shape our development roadmap.

As the event unfolded, we got invited to join a panel on innovation and product development–a most welcome bonus during the show.

Lisbon inspired us to move one step further and gave us confidence to start preparing for our demo roadshow across the US.

Splet Tech Conference

Splet Tech was a regional innovation and startup conference which gathered dozens of companies, angel and VC investors, institutional and private ecosystem builders and over 5000 tech enthusiasts for a day of intensive networking, thought leadership panels and compelling product demos from a host of industries.

Since it’s no secret that we’ve been developing Autofocals® in Serbia (as our co-founder Neb is originally from there), it made sense to run our first public demo in Belgrade in front of our home crowd during Splet.

It was the first time we set out to partake in an event where we would get to demo in rapid succession for an audience this heterogenous in every single way: age, gender, profession, eyewear prescription, you name it. We did over 70 demos in just under 5 hours and recruited some of our first beta testers during this event, which was very inspirational for our team.

Our Splet Tech debut confirmed our ability to take our product out of the engineering lab and test it out in the wild, which was a huge milestone in our R&D process. It also indicated key areas for improvement, which is why we doubled our efforts to improve lens quality, AI eye tracking performance (especially in edge cases) and lens refocusing speed.