Xpanceo Raises $40M to Focus on Smart Contact Lenses

UAE-based Deep tech startup, XPANCEO, announced it raised a $40 million seed round led by Hong Kong-based Opportunity Ventures (Asia), according to a company statement.

The deep tech startup will use the funding to launch the first contact lenses with AR vision features. The money will be invested to launch the next prototype, in which the company will collect several features in one device.

The company wants to make tech more simple, and it believes the way to do that is to make it seamless and more connected to how we operate every day. According to a press release by the company “All current computers will be obsolete [because] they’re not interchangeable,” said Roman Axelrod, who co-founded the startup with material scientist and physicist Valentyn S. Volkov. “We are enslaved by gadgets.”

With a focus on new materials and moving away from silicon-based processing and towards new approaches to using optoelectronics, Xpanceo’s modest ambition, Axelrod said in an interview, is to “merge all the gadgets into one, to provide humanity with a gadget with an infinite screen. What we aim for is to create the next generation of computing.”

Xpanceo was founded in 2021 and is based out of Dubai, and before now it has been bootstrapped. Its team of more than 50 scientists and engineers has mainly, up to now, been working on different prototypes of lenses and all of the hard work that goes into that.