Fuller Vision: Betting on a hardware startup in Serbia

This is how Vladimir Vojvodić, COO of Fuller Vision, started our conversation. Hardware-based startups face uniquely complex challenges: longer development cycles, slower iterations, challenging MVPs, and most importantly, less interest from investors. While a fintech startup might spark the interest of 5 investors and an AI startup of 1.7 investors, a hardware-based startup might only attract 0.3 investors, according to Dealroom’s European Deep Tech report 2023.

Challenges abound in hardware innovation. And Fuller Vision was, in Vojvodic’s words, crazy enough to take them on.

About Fuller Vision

Fuller Vision tackles presbyopia, a condition that reduces the human eye’s ability to switch focus rapidly with age. To address this, they’ve developed Autofocals - glasses that automatically adjust eye focus on objects at any distance.

Co-founders Nebojša Šabovic and Reed Foster started their journey in a garage in San Francisco, determined to help their parents restore their vision. After the initial prototyping was done, they moved development to Belgrade and started hiring.

In late-2023, the team started extensively testing their glasses in public. One of the first presentations happened with Swiss EP assistance, in June 2024, at the Early-stage startup investing in the Central East Europe region event co-organized by Swiss EP, Impact Hub, Kickstart Innovation, and PurposeTech, in partnership with the Greater Zurich Area in Switzerland. The event aimed to showcase the best the Balkans offer in the verticals of health-tech and climate-tech. Reed pitched in front of an audience of investors, presenting features of the glasses and sat down with a few of the angels already at the event. In the fall, he travelled back to Switzerland for negotiations with angel investors.

Later that year, Fuller Vision presented at the Splet Tech Conference and gained extensive interest from visitors, investors, and the media. Their next stop was the Web Summit in Lisbon, where they were part of the Serbian delegation.

Plans for 2025 are clear: Fuller Vision will be fully focussed on a limited series of the first batch of Autofocals, due for release in early 2026. The team has been developing the product for almost seven years, securing substantial funding, and a strong early adopter base.

Fundraising in Serbia and abroad

Locally, Nebojša and Reed obtained early funding through a €228,000 grant from the Innovation Fund Serbia in 2019, followed by €300,000 from the Katapult accelerator in 2022. They’ve raised a total of $5 million from angel investors and VCs between 2018 and 2024.

While talking about fundraising, Vladimir explains:

When you’re just starting to build a complex hardware product, FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) is at its maximum. The best way to overcome this is via incremental progress that you can demonstrate to people who deeply understand the problem you’re trying to solve. For us, this was eye doctors—ophthalmologists and optometrists! So, we got some of our earliest checks from them. Having eye doctors in our corner enabled us to zero in on the details behind our problem and vet our concept as we progressed with development.

Having individuals in your investor pool requires a different approach from one you would adopt with an organization as your funder. And yet another, if you also bring on manufacturing and prototyping corporate partners. Vladimir explains their investor management process:

We maintain this network through regular investor updates. We typically send an update every 8-10 weeks and inform them about product development, business development, fundraising, and hiring. We also don’t shy away from asking for specific help.

Early adopters—where and how?

This focus on sustained communication is not limited to the venture’s investors however. The team is committed to relationship-building with their early adopters through direct, personal messaging to better understand how customers cope with presbyopia every day.

In Vladimir’s experience:

People who disproportionately care about the problem can help you find early adopters, which is why we have optometrists and eye doctors in this crowd. They are also a recruitment channel for us, as an average optometrist interacts with thousands of people each year and knows who is a good fit for our glasses.

Is this adventure worth the risk?

If you have to be a masochist or crazy to develop a hardware startup, why do it?

Vladimir’s answer is simple: when you do it right, you can create more value and benefit than you would developing a typical SaaS product.

Fuller Vision plans to close its series A investment in the next 12 months, following the pre-sales campaign of their first 1000 glasses retailing at 6000 USD each. The team has kicked off their US roadshow and will visit both the West Coast and the East Coast in the following months to demo Autofocals to early adopters.

This is just the beginning. The upcoming years will be crucial for this team and we'll be happy to continue to support them, every step of the way.