About Lensare

Founder Story

Hi! I'm Mark, the founder of Lensare.

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I love to build things that are innovative and solve problems people have quietly accepted as unsolvable.

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Lensare first began as a high school project. I came up with an idea for mitigating exposure to flashing light: using an electrochromic lens to block it the moment it's detected. Instead of a static filter that's always dark, an adaptive one that applies tint only when it's actually needed. Nothing on the market did this for light sensitivity. I didn't even know if it was possible to build, let alone in a glasses format. Over the next year I built Lensare V1, purely to prove it could be done in a wearable form. It worked. But building it was how I discovered I'd been thinking about the problem the wrong way round.

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The issue was never a lack of solutions. Tinted lenses for light sensitivity already existed, and the clinical evidence behind them was strong. The issue was that they were permanently dark. People were being asked to accept altered vision every waking hour in exchange for protection they only needed occasionally, and unsurprisingly, most of them stopped wearing them.

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That reframed the whole project for me. The technology didn't need to work better. It needed to get out of the way.

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V2 and V3 followed over the next two years - custom circuit boards, sensors, firmware, and frames, mostly designed and built from my desk. Lensare now sits at a light everyday tint and darkens within 20 milliseconds when it detects dangerous light, then clears again. Along the way it won the New Zealand national James Dyson Award.

Lensare isn't finished. It hasn't been clinically validated yet, and I won't claim it protects anyone until the data says so, a hospital EEG study is the next step. Not a product launch. But I'm convinced the approach is right, and I intend to see it through.