Envision, a Netherlands-based start-up that made hardware and software tools for the visually impaired, will be stopping product development at the end of the year unless it can find a partner.
In a statement posted to the company's website on Monday, founder Karthik Mahadevan and Karthik Kannan said that despite efforts towards a successful business model, the company has been unable to yield profitable results.
"We reached the conclusion that we have given it our all and brought Envision as far as we could with our nimble efforts," they wrote.
"There’s still so much potential for this product and business to grow, but realising it needs someone who can take it in a new direction, whether that's a new audience or a different business model."
Mr Mahadevan and Mr Kannan said they were in talks with a few possible partners who might be able to keep the company going. They were also open to speaking with others who may have ideas as to how to keep it alive.
In 2024, Envision's founders spoke with The National about the company's aspirations.
Its journey to selling smart glasses for the visually impaired started in 2017, when the start-up's smartphone app, Envision AI, began to gain popularity.
The app uses a phone camera to identify and read signs, objects, menus, books or other material in real time, making life easier for visually impaired users.
The popularity of the app's free version, according to Mr Kannan at the time, fuelled Envision's desire to improve the user experience based on feedback from customers.
“If you're a low-vision person and you have to have a phone in one hand and a cane in the other, that can be cumbersome,” he said. “So we started looking for something that might be sleek and modern-looking to implement.”
Part of enhancing the experience, Mr Kannan said, was to take the best aspects of the Envision app and use it in the glasses.
Envision's app won a Google Play Award in 2019 in the category of “best accessibility experience”, and Mr Kannan said it could come to an agreement with Google and eventually use the company's largely defunct Google Glass technology for its product.
The glasses, priced from $1,899 to $3,499, were introduced in 2020 and underwent various improvements amid the AI boom.
In the announcement on Monday, the founders outlined plans to wind down operations and promised there would be a final update, with hopes of keeping the app and some offerings operational for as long as possible "offline”.
Mr Mahadevan and Mr Kannan said the ultimate problem was scaling Envision's business model to something sustainable given the competition from Apple and Meta, and the current economy.
"On paper, 300 million blind and low-vision people is a big market, but for the majority of them, the problems that come first are ones technology can't solve yet: poverty, lack of basic access, unemployment," Envision’s founders wrote.
"That's why even products that are cheap or free struggle to get past that million mark, and paying users are a much much smaller slice of that."
In 2024, Envision told The National of the intention to turn the company's focus to Arabic.
"As our user base in the Middle East grew and we built up a community of users, we've started to bring a lot more of those efforts in-house,” Mr Kannan said.
“As a result, we now have more control over how the AI works when translating documents that are scanned and how it works if there's written text on a blackboard.”
