BE MY EYES APS

Their core work

Be My Eyes builds and operates a mobile application that connects blind and visually impaired users with sighted volunteers through live video calls, enabling real-time visual assistance for everyday tasks. Their H2020 work extended this platform toward enterprise B2B services: a specialized help desk that connects companies directly with their blind and visually impaired customers, supported by AI and machine learning for adaptive interfaces. The company's dual trajectory — consumer social impact app and enterprise accessibility tool — is rare in assistive technology and gives them both large-scale deployment experience and commercial service design capability. They sit at the intersection of inclusive design, AI-augmented customer service, and disability technology.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their first H2020 project in 2018 (SME-1 feasibility, €50K) focused on the core volunteer platform — connecting sighted people to blind users — with no AI or commercial framing. By 2019-2020, the Phase 2 project introduced entirely new vocabulary: customer service, help desk, enterprise integration, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. This marks a deliberate pivot from social-impact peer assistance toward a scalable, AI-supported enterprise service. The trajectory suggests they used EU funding to validate and commercialize what began as a charitable utility.

Be My Eyes is moving away from volunteer-mediated peer assistance toward AI-augmented, enterprise-grade customer service tooling for accessibility — a commercially viable and regulation-driven market as EU accessibility mandates expand.

How they like to work

Be My Eyes operated as a solo coordinator on both H2020 projects, using the SME Instrument's single-company format — no consortium was required or formed. This means they have no recorded experience of collaborative multi-partner project management within EU frameworks. They are unlikely to be familiar with the administrative and coordination demands of large Horizon consortia, making them better suited as a specialist technology provider or end-user organization in future projects rather than a consortium lead.

No consortium partners were recorded across either H2020 project; both grants were solo SME Instrument awards. Their H2020 footprint reflects zero cross-border collaboration at the project level, though their commercial platform operates globally.

What sets them apart

Be My Eyes is not a research organization — it is a deployed product company with a real global user base of millions of blind and sighted users, which is exceptional among H2020 SME participants. This means any collaboration with them brings access to an actual end-user community for testing, validation, and dissemination, not just a prototype. For consortia working on AI, accessibility, or inclusive digital services, Be My Eyes offers something most academic or startup partners cannot: proven product-market fit and direct channel to the disability community.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BEMYEYES
  The SME-2 phase (€1,081,570, 2019-2020) is notable for its pivot to an enterprise B2B model, combining AI, help desk technology, and accessibility compliance into a commercial service — not typical for an assistive tech nonprofit-origin app.
• BEMYEYES
  The SME-1 feasibility study (€50,000, 2018) established EU validation for the core platform at an early stage, making Be My Eyes one of the few consumer accessibility apps to receive EU innovation funding.