Eyebot sees a future where technology works seamlessly with Eye Care Professionals to expand access to personalized vision care for all those who need it.
Matthias Hofmann, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the details of Eyebot, and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
- Details on Eyebot
- Use Cases / How they fill a need
- The latest with Eyebot
- Hiring plans
- The culture at Eyebot
- Why Eyebot should be on the radar for job seekers
Video Transcript
Matthias, thanks so much for joining us.
Hey Keith, good to see you.
I’m excited to talk to you because we’re going to talk about Eyebot, which we did a podcast interview back in February. I’m going to include a link to that in this video, but I want to bring everyone up to speed on what’s been happening at Eyebot.
If someone’s not familiar with the company, what is Eyebot?
Yeah. Thanks for having me again. It’s certainly a very exciting time right now. So much happening at Eyebot. Eyebot, we essentially automate vision testing to get your eyes checked very quickly, in a matter of seconds. It takes about just 90 seconds for somebody to walk up to an Eyebot station—it’s a 5-foot tall kiosk. You go through a battery of tests.
We can essentially, if you qualify, get to an eyeglass prescription through tele-doctors that are in our network, as well as also collect information to screen for certain types of diseases in the future. What we discovered in our trials is that there’s just a large amount of people walking around not knowing what’s going on with their eyes, and also a lot of people walking around not seeing well because they don’t have glasses. There’s just a massive opportunity to solve that problem.
What I love about it is this is real, it’s in market. Talk about use cases—customers or whatever you can share.
We can’t share too much right now, but what I will say is that we’re having some really exciting launches coming up in the coming months, and you’ll see it in the news. We’re looking to expand in both enterprise, mid-market, all the way through SMB.
The problem in the industry is that there’s a lack of doctors. That is true for the biggest companies in the world all the way down to the mom-and-pop stores. If you have an eyeglass retail store (a traditional four-wall store or a more novel concept), there’s simply not enough doctors in the country to supply all these stores. In fact, over 50% of stores are struggling or can’t find a doctor. That’s really where Eyebot comes in. We can really supplement all those locations with Eyebot technology so that eventually you can just walk into an eyeglass store, push a button, and get your glasses.
That’s amazing. All right. So, what’s the latest at the company?
We also recently raised a new round with a fantastic partner—a $20 million raise for our Series A. That’s really exciting. It piggybacks off of what we would call the mystical idea of product-market fit. We do feel that moment happened to us around January/February, coming hot off of CES, which was a blowout. Since then, practically all our sales are inbound. We’re getting inbound from not only the US—from the biggest corporations but also from SMB—but also internationally. It is the same problem internationally as well: if you want to do optical retail, you need to have a way to get to a prescription, and there’s just a human labor shortage. It’s not just doctors, but all the other store staff, not only in the US but worldwide. That’s where Eyebot can help and step in.
All right. So what’s the plans in terms of hiring?
We have a pretty aggressive hiring schedule. We just had five more people start yesterday, on Monday, actually. That’s the kind of pace we’re going at right now. We’re looking for the brightest and best in Boston. It’s exciting to be part of the Boston Tech ecosystem here.
Is it across all functional areas, like engineering, mechanical, sales, everything?
Yes.
That’s awesome. All right. So, what’s the culture like? What’s the day-to-day culture like working at Eyebot?
We have a very friendly but focused culture. One thing that we optimize for is that we work hard, but we spend a lot of time together, and we want to make sure that our personalities also fit. That is really important to us culturally. We have three things that we look out for:
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At Eyebot, your opinion and your ideas matter equally. It doesn’t matter what your title or rank is. Nobody will get shut down about voicing a concern, but you always have to come back with a solution.
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We always allow anyone to ask questions as much as they want. There’s sort of an unlimited question policy. You can ask the same question five times in a row, and there’s no punishment, because we want to really get to the bottom of things.
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This is one of the more important ones to us: no egos. You can leave your ego at home. We hire people—it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree or not. We hire PhDs. We hire across the board. Pedigree and school does not matter to us so much. What matters to us is what have you built in the past and can you be equally awesome doing that at Eyebot.
All right, so top tier talent, they always have options in front of them. So why is now the ideal time to join Eyebot?
We’re going through a really interesting growth phase right now, and certainly coming hot off of a great Series A, it’s usually a good time to enter a company because there’s good projection of growth that can also mean a lot with equity.
There’s just so much to do, and especially at this stage, typically what happens is that this is a point where you do six months of a very specific task you were hired for, but then after that, there’s so much opportunity to grow in the direction that you want to because there are so many problems to solve. We give people very quickly and very early on a lot of responsibility right away.
All right. So this is a company that I am deeply excited about. I do believe this is going to be an anchor tech company in the Boston tech scene. It’s got everything—fresh funding, a revolutionary idea, a great team. They’re in market. This is the prime opportunity to join the company. So go to their company page on VentureFizz which has all their job listings. Go to venturefizz.com/eyebot and you’ll find all their listings there. Matthias, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on Eyebot.
Thank you, Keith.
