Waterloo Engineering startup wins big

Friday, November 28, 2014

EyeCheck, a startup that brings eye exams to impoverished and remote communities, was the big winner at the fall Velocity Fund Finals (VFF). The team is one of four Waterloo-based startups to win a $25,000 grant from Velocity, an entrepreneurship program at the University of Waterloo. EyeCheck also won an additional $10,000 as the competition’s top hardware startup.

EyeCheck team accepting their awards

EyeCheck was developed as a Capstone Design project by systems design students Ashutosh Syal and Daxal Desai after their professor John Zelek challenged his class to come up with a mobile phone-based solution to assess near-sightedness in third-world countries.

The project offers a low-cost alternative for performing eye exams, and solves the problem of providing prescriptions for millions of people in developing countries. It uses a smartphone app, standalone camera and server-side image processing to provide a prescription in half the time of a traditional eye exam.

Desai said the VFF money will be used to develop their hardware, including the camera that takes images of patients’ eyes to provide a prescription. “It will also help us gather field data in India, where hundreds of people line up to get their vision checked.”

Supporting Waterloo’s startups

“Funding for early stage companies is invaluable. The Velocity Fund allows us to provide support to startups and invest in their future through grants,” said Mike Kirkup, director of Velocity. “The incredible ecosystems that Velocity, as part of the University of Waterloo, has built provides unmatched education, mentorship, networking and additional resources to our startups.”