Zeiss invests EUR 2.2 million in eye-tracking firm SeeTrue

Optics giant Zeiss's latest investment has put a deep-tech startup from a small Finnish town in the spotlight.

In August, SeeTrue Technologies announced the completion of a €2.2 million funding round led by Zeiss Ventures.

The optics leader, with annual revenue approaching €12 billion, is investing in this startup now — why? The sum is modest, just €2.2 million, but Zeiss's entry is still worth examining.

For SeeTrue Technologies, the funding will help bring its ultra-low-power eye-sensing architecture to market faster, while also supporting team expansion and international growth. To understand why ZEISS invested in the company, however, it helps to look at the specifics of the business.

Solved with neurosurgical techniques

The "Impossible Triangle" of Eye Tracking

SeeTrue was co-founded in 2018 by Roman Bednarik and Piotr Bartczak. The company focuses on system-level co-designed eye-tracking sensing architectures, using proprietary miniature sensing hardware and highly optimized embedded processing algorithms to minimize device size, power consumption and compute overhead while maintaining performance.

Eye tracking has hardly lacked players in recent years, but few have genuinely brought power consumption down to levels acceptable for wearable devices while preserving accuracy and speed. SeeTrue's ability to secure funding from ZEISS owes much to its taking a somewhat different technical path.

This brings up a familiar issue in smart glasses and related fields: the eye-tracking industry has long faced an "impossible trinity" of high frame rate, high accuracy and low power consumption — three metrics that are generally hard to achieve at the same time.

Traditional camera-based solutions must capture large amounts of pixel data, driving up computation and, naturally, power use. Electrooculography-based solutions save power, but their accuracy falls short and they are unusable in many scenarios. Add the small batteries and need for minimal weight in smart glasses, and supporting high-load tasks such as eye tracking, speech recognition and AI inference within such tight constraints is a tall order.

The result is that the interactive features of many products work only in demos and never truly reach deployment.

SeeTrue's technology is designed specifically to solve these problems.

The company's technology originated in neurosurgical medical settings, where its stability has been rigorously validated. Co-founder and CEO Roman Bednarik is a professor of interactive technology at the University of Eastern Finland. Against that academic background, he led a team that built the world's first eye tracker for surgical microscopes. In a neurosurgical operating room, an eye tracker must be error-free 100% of the time, and it is precisely under these extreme demands that SeeTrue's technological edge was forged.

Back to the technology. SeeTrue's approach is to co-design miniature sensing hardware and highly optimized embedded processing algorithms as an integrated whole, rather than simply assembling off-the-shelf components.

In practice, SeeTrue performs dynamic sensing based on anatomical structures, combining custom optics, on-device computing and hardware-level synchronization to deliver eye tracking. The advantage is that eye-tracking data can be processed entirely on the device, with no need to send it to the cloud, resulting in low latency and strong privacy protection.

SeeTrue has so far filed five patents, focused mainly on core technologies such as detecting where a person's gaze lands and the design of near-eye devices such as smart glasses.

Its product line includes the ST AIR embedded eye-tracking module for AR/VR and smart glasses, the ST ART eyepiece module for microscopes and telescopes, the ST ONE Light wearable eye tracker, and the ST RING multi-device synchronization system.

The ST AIR module delivers real-time, high-frame-rate gaze tracking at ultra-low power, with data processed directly on the board and no raw video stream transmitted; ST RING, meanwhile, can synchronize hundreds or even thousands of eye trackers with an accuracy of 50 microseconds.

Eye Tracking: A Crowded

but Fast-Growing Field

In the global eye tracking market, SeeTrue is still relatively small, but its technology approach is genuinely distinctive.

The overall eye tracking field has kept expanding. Cumulative global eye tracking patent applications surpassed 28,000 by the end of 2025. The global VR/AR/XR eye tracking market reached $2.73 billion in 2025, up 48.6% year on year. That same year, shipments of smart glasses supporting eye-based interaction totaled 6.8 million units. By the first quarter of 2026, eye tracking was integrated in 34% of consumer headsets.

SeeTrue faces plenty of competitors in this field, including well-known players such as Tobii, Varjo and Pupil Labs. Compared with them, SeeTrue's biggest differentiator is its focus on "ultra-low power consumption" and "miniaturization". Tobii's technology, for example, is widely used in scientific research, consumer experience research and automotive applications, whereas SeeTrue concentrates on wearables and embedded optical systems.

Objectively speaking, a €2.2 million seed round is not exactly generous for a hardware venture. But one thing is clear: demand for eye tracking in smart glasses is becoming urgent, and that is the opportunity SeeTrue most wants to capture.

Eye-tracking technology is becoming increasingly important for smart glasses, largely because of the interaction bottlenecks the industry is currently facing.

Smart glasses have become thinner and lighter in recent years, which is a good thing, but interaction methods have not kept pace. Speech recognition struggles in noisy environments, gesture recognition depends on lighting conditions, and touchpad controls are not intuitive enough. A growing number of people in the industry believe eye tracking could be one of the key technologies for next-generation natural interaction.

But actually implementing eye tracking in smart glasses is genuinely difficult, and almost none of today's products have achieved it. Eye tracking requires sensors to stay on and continuously read data, which consumes power in itself. At the same time, the glasses must also power the display, Bluetooth, microphone and camera, and the combined load puts heavy pressure on the battery. In addition, running the computation on-device offers speed and privacy, but is equally power-hungry.

Roman Bednarik, CEO and co-founder of SeeTrue, has said that the company is not merely improving eye tracking, but shrinking it to fit the future of wearables. If XR and AI glasses are to achieve mass adoption, eye tracking must be "invisible" to users yet more powerful for the device.

This also neatly explains why ZEISS would be interested in such a small company.

The head of ZEISS Ventures believes SeeTrue has developed a differentiated approach to eye tracking, and that the team is capable of solving key challenges in vision-based applications. At the same time, their technology has the potential to make human-machine interaction in medical and other professional workflows more intuitive, efficient and seamless.

ZEISS has made a number of investments in the wearables space in recent years. In 2018, ZEISS and Deutsche Telekom formed the joint venture tooz technologies, focused on AR optics solutions and prescription lens adaptation. In October 2025, it also set up "ZEISS Extended Reality" as a new strategic business unit.

Looking further back, ZEISS also acquired Swiss company Vivior AG, whose frame-mounted sensors track the wearer's actual visual behavior. It has also invested in Morrow Eyewear, a Belgian company developing autofocus glasses.

Judging from ZEISS's moves in recent years, it has gradually built up expertise across the full technology chain, from optical lenses and display solutions to eye-tracking interaction. SeeTrue sits squarely at the "interaction layer," and its ultra-low-power technology approach is precisely the missing piece in ZEISS's existing portfolio.

Summary

For SeeTrue, ZEISS's entry brings far more than the €2.2 million.

Founder Roman Bednarik says ZEISS's deep expertise in optical system design and vision technology will be a major help as the company continues to develop and commercialize its eye-sensing platform. The investors also include Luminate — the world's largest startup accelerator for optics, photonics and imaging. For a deep-tech startup based in a small Finnish city, these resources may be worth more than the funding itself.

The smart glasses market in 2026 is at a delicate turning point. In the second quarter of 2025, AI accounted for just 19% of wearable glasses shipments, but by the second quarter of 2026 that share had surged past 85%. Global AR glasses shipments topped 28 million units in 2025, and this year they are expected to exceed 42 million units.

The industry widely expects Apple to be developing smart glasses with integrated eye tracking, possibly launching between 2026 and 2027. During this window, eye-tracking technology is moving from the lab to the consumer market.

The real question is whether eye tracking will become a standard feature of smart glasses or remain confined to a handful of high-end devices. SeeTrue has essentially bet on the former. If eye-tracking modules can be made small enough, power-efficient enough and cheap enough, they could follow the same path as fingerprint recognition on smartphones and become standard equipment on smart glasses.

SeeTrue, of course, still faces many challenges. Long-established players such as Tobii entered earlier and have deeper customer relationships. Apple, Meta and Google are also developing eye tracking in-house. SeeTrue will need more time to establish an advantage against the in-house technologies of these giants.

Text / Lan Huaying

(Images not credited in the article are from the internet.)

       Original title : Zeiss bets another €2.2 million: Is eye tracking the next big thing for smart glasses?