Industrializing prescription optics for smart eyewear.

Founded:

2016

Tech

Advanced Optics

Forward.one entry point:

Early-stage investor, scaled through growth rounds

Headquarters

Delft, The Netherlands

The Challenge

Smart glasses will not scale unless they work for the billions of people who need vision correction. Yet traditional optical manufacturing is slow, wasteful, and fundamentally incompatible with the thin, lightweight form factors required for AR and XR devices.

Conventional subtractive lens grinding removes up to 80% of the starting material, produces microplastic waste, and makes it nearly impossible to integrate waveguides and electronics without adding bulk or fragility. Vision correction has become a structural bottleneck in the smart eyewear value chain.

AddOptics was built to remove that bottleneck.

FORWARD.one involvement

We invested in AddOptics because it delivers a scalable, defensible manufacturing breakthrough at the intersection of optics, hardware, and next-generation computing. The company solves a real industrial constraint: how to integrate prescription lenses, waveguides, and electronics into a single, durable optical component, at production speed.

AddOptics’ proprietary monolithic casting process encapsulates optical and electronic elements directly within the lens, creating a rugged, single-piece structure suitable for real-world use. Combined with 3D printing, this approach reduces lead times by up to 10×, while maintaining mass-production quality.

This aligns precisely with our deeptech strategy: hardware-led innovation, protected by process IP, with clear pull from global OEMs. Beyond capital, we support AddOptics with industrial scaling, commercialization strategy, and positioning within the emerging smart eyewear supply chain.

If we want smart glasses to become the next primary computing platform, they must first be great glasses, thin, lightweight, and offering perfect vision correction for the billions of people who already wear them.

Joris Biskop

CEO

Every hardware platform is constrained by its hardest component. In smart eyewear, that component is optics. AddOptics turns vision correction from a bottleneck into an industrial process, unlocking scale, sustainability, and real-world adoption.

Results

AddOptics is redefining how optical components are designed and manufactured:

Enables thin, lightweight prescription smart lenses, removing a major adoption barrier for AR and XR devices.
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Up to 10× faster development cycles compared to traditional lens manufacturing, accelerating time-to-market for hardware platforms.
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Monolithic lens architecture that protects embedded waveguides and electronics, improving durability and field reliability.
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Material- and water-efficient production, replacing wasteful subtractive grinding with additive and casting-based processes that significantly reduce microplastic waste.

As smart glasses evolve into a primary computing interface, AddOptics is building the optical foundation that makes scale possible.