CLAIRE (Contact Lens Artificial Intelligence Research and Engineering) has secured its first pre-seed investment from Think Bigger Capital (SP) and SVDVS Beheer BV (NL), to develop its Artificial Intelligence-based APPs platform that will help Eye Care Professionals (ECPs) to minimize errors, increase their clinical portfolio and their patients’ satisfaction when managing specialty contact lenses (CLs).
Research has shown that ECP’s consider specialty CL management as being time-consuming (88%) and technically difficult (84%), which results in many lens changes (58%) leading to decreasing patient compliance. On top of that, 57% of inquired ECP’s do contact their supplier’s technical support on a regular basis. CLAIRE APPs platform provides ECP’s virtual technical support, calculation and ordering tools.
The idea for CLAIRE came about after co-founder Rafael Clérigo, as Head of Technical Support in a CL manufacturer, noticed that his team was spending too much time, up to 30m-40m per lens, with technical support leading to a strong decrease in efficiency and profitability. From the other end Luís Lopes (co-founder), partner of a CL distribution
company, observed that his customers often complained about the time they waste with each patient while fitting specialty CLs, which greatly limited the company’s sales growth. CLAIRE adds value for ECPs and CL manufacturers or distributors, by increasing efficiency, reducing time and costs during the fitting process.
Incubated at DEMIUM (Lisbon), CLAIRE offers subscription plans for easy access to the current and future premium web-based APPs mainly focused on myopia and presbyopia CLs. Additionally, the team will implement partnerships with CL manufacturers and distributors worldwide operating in those market segments as well on irregular cornea
market that in total account for more than 11 million prescribed CLs per year. The team believes the company will bring a major change to the relationships between manufacturers, distributors and ECP’s resulting in increased efficiencies, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.
To know more about CLAIRE please drop us an email to: info@clairetool.com
About: CLAIRE is a web-based platform with premium web-based and free APPs for the easy management of specialty CLs. Started in March 2021, CLAIRE is based in Torres Vedras (Lisbon-Portugal) and part of the team is based in Madrid (Spain).