Roughly 45 million people in the U.S. alone wear contact lenses. Just a fraction of those folks need to convert to smart contact lenses for the technology to potentially take off and have its "iPhone moment," says Valentyn Volkov, a cofounder of Xpanceo, one of the most promising smart contact lens startups in 2026.
Breaking down consumer technology barriers is arguably in the brand's DNA, says Roman Axelrod, Xpanceo's other cofounder. His grandfather was a Soviet engineer in the 1950s who worked on early computer systems, watching them ultimately transform into the high-power smartphones we carry today.
