Virtual Vision Health, a Miami-based medical device technology and software startup, has raised a $1 million seed round led by GOVO Venture Partners and including individual investors.
Co-founded and led by Matteo Ziff, Virtual Vision is on a mission to transform how eye care professionals diagnose and manage ocular conditions by providing virtual reality-based testing solutions. The company manufactures Virtual Eye, an FDA-cleared device backed by two years of research and validation at the University of Miami’s world-renowned Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.
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Virtual Vision is GOVO Ventures’ 12th portfolio investment since the launch of GOVO’s inaugural venture fund in January of 2023. As part of GOVO’s $500,000 investment in Virtual Vision, GOVO General Partner Brian D’Ambrosio will join Virtual Vision’s Board of Advisors.
“When the GOVO team looks at a company deploying a novel technology, we carefully scrutinize whether the technology drives real value. Here Matteo and the team at Virtual Vision have deployed a new technology – in this case, virtual reality – to meaningfully advance ocular healthcare,” said GOVO Managing General Partner Rob Panepinto. “We are confident that healthcare providers worldwide will find the technology to be a useful, practical solution that advances patient care.”
In the last five years, it was apparent there was a strong need for making diagnostic vision testing for both the clinic and at-home testing more efficient, streamlined, and portable, especially during COVID when at home-testing became a necessity, and advances in VR technology allowed this vision to become reality, said Ziff, Virtual Vision’s CEO.
“In 2021, Dr. Alana Grajewski from Bascom Palmer Eye Institute came up with the idea for a portable diagnostic testing device and we partnered together to make it happen,” Ziff shared with Refresh Miami.
Virtual Vision has been on the market since September 2022, with thousands of devices sold globally, Ziff said. “Our devices and diagnostic tests are used in all 50 states and 20 countries worldwide. We have over 2 million exams completed and millions of patients that have used our device.”
Now, Virtual Vision is a team of 40, said Ziff, and “not a single person has retired or left since our inception.”
Virtual Vision will use the funding to expand its sales force and to further complete international regulatory requirements to open up new markets globally. “This investment validates the work we’ve done to bring groundbreaking VR solutions to eye care, and it fuels our ability to continue delivering revolutionary products that empower doctors and transform patient care worldwide,” Ziff said.
Ziff is also a co-founder of VirtuaLens, a new company building a VR simulation for visualizing the effects of intraocular lenses to patients who are undergoing cataract and refractive surgery. Through a partnership announced this month, Virtual Vision is distributing the VirtuaLens in the United States and Brazil.
As part of Govo’s investment, Govo will also acquire equity in VirtuaLens.
GOVO Venture Partners, based in Winter Park, invests in early-stage companies in which doing business with the government or navigating government regulations is an important success factor. Jonathan Kilman, based in Miami, is a general partner in the venture firm that also counts Tim Tebow as a partner.
GOVO invests in seed through Series A deals, and prefers to make its first investments at the seed stage. Other South Florida companies GOVO has invested in include Kind Designs, Medzown, Mavi.io and CodeComply.Ai. “When we launched Govo, we felt our thesis strongly overlapped the innovation engines of Florida, and that is so far proving to be the case,” Panepinto said in an earlier interview.
