Azalea Vision announced that it has been selected for the European Innovation Council Accelerator. The funding will help advance Azalea’s medical-grade smart contact lens platform into clinical development.
Azalea Vision is a Belgian healthtech company building a smart contact lens designed for medical use. The company is the only Belgian company selected in the latest EIC Accelerator funding round.
Azalea will receive up to €7.5 million in blended finance. The funding includes a €2.5 million non-dilutive grant and a planned €5 million equity investment from the EIC Fund.
The EIC Accelerator is the European Union’s flagship program for breakthrough and market-creating deep tech companies. The program is part of Horizon Europe and supports startups viewed as capable of creating or disrupting global markets.
Azalea said fewer than 5% of applicants make it through the EIC Accelerator’s expert and jury review process. The company also said it ranked among the highest-scoring applicants in its cohort.
Azalea’s smart lens platform is designed to improve quality of life for people living with irregular corneas, higher-order aberrations, and presbyopia. The company said the same device could also support a biosensing platform capable of measuring biomarkers in tears.
Azalea said the EIC award provides external validation of its technology, clinical strategy, and commercial potential. The funding will support clinical work and final engineering steps needed to bring the platform to patients.
Azalea said its core platform functionality has been established and technical validation is nearing completion. The award is expected to accelerate the company’s transition from technical validation to a certified medical product.
With the EIC endorsement secured, Azalea is opening conversations with strategic and financial investors across Europe and the U.S. to co-invest alongside the EIC Fund in its upcoming financing round.
Azalea Vision was founded in 2021 as a spin-off from imec and Ghent University. The company’s lens-embedded system integrates adaptive optics, custom microelectronics, liquid-crystal technology, and connectivity to address vision conditions and enable tear-based health monitoring.
KEY QUOTES:
“This is one of the toughest funding programs in the world to win, and it validates everything we have been building — our technology, our vision, and the size of the market in front of us. Our technical validation is nearly complete and the core platform works. This award gives us the resources to prove it clinically, and to do it from Europe. We intend to move fast.”
Andrés Vasquez Quintero, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Azalea Vision
