Glassless wins Startup Acceleration Prize at Lazio Innova's Boost Your Ideas

An acceleration programme for market readiness

Boost Your Ideas supports innovative startups and entrepreneurial teams as they move from early-stage development towards market readiness. The programme combines training, coaching, specialist mentoring and networking opportunities with companies, investors and other organisations across the innovation ecosystem, helping participants validate their business models, strengthen their market positioning and accelerate their path to market.

As one of the six winners, Glassless received €15,000 in prize money, together with €6,000 worth of specialised services to support its go-to-market strategy and commercial development.

Challenging the business around the technology

The programme came at an important stage in Glassless' development. While the company was already working on the underlying technology, the Boost Your Ideas programme gave the team the opportunity to step back from the technology itself and challenge how the business could be built around it.

Through mentoring and coaching, Glassless reassessed elements of its business model, refined its commercial positioning and explored new routes to market. The programme also helped the team think beyond the initial technology proposition and focus on how Glassless could ultimately reach and create value for the millions of people experiencing presbyopia.

Glassless is developing an on-device neural pre-compensation engine that modifies digital display content to compensate for the effects of presbyopia. Rather than relying on additional optical hardware, the technology adapts what is displayed on a screen to the user's vision, with the long-term goal of enabling people to interact with smartphones, tablets and laptops without relying on reading glasses.

“We are incredibly happy to have received the Startup Acceleration Prize from Boost Your Ideas. The programme came at a crucial stage for Glassless and gave us the opportunity to step back from the technology and really challenge how we wanted to build the business around it. It pushed us to rethink our business model, sharpen our positioning and think further about how we could bring Glassless to the people who need it. Our mentors, Claudia Attanasio and Francesco Righetti, were instrumental throughout the programme, challenging our assumptions and helping us move forward with greater clarity. The €15,000 in prize money and €6,000 in go-to-market services are a significant boost for us as we continue developing the technology and working towards bringing Glassless to market.”

From prize to market

The award marked an important milestone in Glassless' early development and provided the company with additional resources and support as it progressed from technology development towards validation across two human studies, commercial pilots and market deployment.

About Boost Your Ideas

Boost Your Ideas is an innovation and acceleration programme promoted by the Lazio Region and implemented by Lazio Innova to support innovative startups, entrepreneurial teams and new business ideas. The programme provides participants with training, coaching, mentoring, networking and opportunities to connect with companies, investors and organisations within the innovation ecosystem.

The programme is designed to help innovative ventures strengthen their business models, accelerate time-to-market and develop the capabilities and partnerships needed to scale.

About Glassless

Glassless is developing vision-correcting software designed to enable people with presbyopia to interact with digital devices without reading glasses. The technology pre-compensates digital content for the user's visual impairment, with the aim of integrating directly into smartphones, applications and other digital platforms.