About Lensare

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

I love to build new things and solve problems people have quietly accepted as unsolvable.

Lensare began as a high school project. My idea was to use an electronically tinting lens to block flashing light the moment it's detected: not a static filter that's always dark, but an adaptive one that tints only when it's needed. I couldn't find anything on the market that did this for light sensitivity, and I didn't know if it could be built in a glasses frame. Over the next year I built Lensare V1, purely to prove it could. It worked. But building it showed me I'd been thinking about the problem the wrong way round.

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 dimmed vision every waking hour in exchange for protection they only needed occasionally.

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

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 lighter everyday tint and, in our bench testing, darkens within about 20 milliseconds when it detects bright or flickering 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 tested, 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.