PeriVision wins EIT Wild Card 2021

Currently, 80 million people worldwide are suffering from glaucoma, a chronic eye disease that leads to blindness. But the increasing number of those affected and limits to specialized eye care infrastructure cause a big percentage of these people not to be diagnosed or not get timely doctors’ appointments to slow down disease progression. PeriVision wants to ease the burden on the healthcare system and allow everyone easy access to glaucoma care through an innovative portable, fast, and easy-to-use device to measure glaucoma progression (via visual field testing). The team around CEO Patrick Kessel, CTO Dr. Serife Kucur, and scientific advisor and board member Prof. Dr. Raphael Sznitman works in close collaboration with the Inselspital Ophthalmology Department as clinical partner to help avoid preventable blindness across the world.

Wild Card is a program, backed by EIT Health and supported by the European Union that builds new ventures each year that break new ground to troubleshoot some of European healthcare’s greatest challenges. It mentors founders-to-be and invests up to EUR 1.5 million in the two most promising ventures. For the 2021 challenge “Eye & Vision Care” the PeriVision team had to convince the jury to select them out of 16 applying teams in the first “Deep Dive” phase and 8 remaining teams in the very competitive “Business Validation” phase.

PeriVision CTO Serife Seda Kucur recounts this second phase: “They challenged us in many aspects from business model to determining the initial beachhead market, from the value proposition to the clinicians to the exit plans. We conducted more than 100 interviews with different stakeholders to validate our business. We were coached by leading experts in the field and had weekly meetings with them where we were given feedback on the progress and on how to improve. At the end of this 10-week long bootcamp, we were asked to pitch with all the improvements and learning we made through the program in front of a panel including investors that are experienced in MedTech and ophthalmology. They then selected two teams, who will receive an investment of up to EUR 1.5M each along with access to dedicated mentors, the EIT Health network and further acceleration and funding programs. We will use this initial money to finalize our product, get the CE and FDA approvals for our medical device and in the meantime prepare our product launch for Europe and US.“