IMAGINE EYES SA

Their core work

IMAGINE EYES is a French deep-tech SME that designs and manufactures advanced retinal imaging instruments, most notably adaptive optics cameras capable of resolving individual photoreceptors and retinal microvasculature at cellular scale. Their work sits at the intersection of precision optics engineering and clinical ophthalmology, producing instruments used in research hospitals and eye clinics to detect and characterize disease at a level impossible with conventional fundus cameras. In their EU projects they have acted as the technical lead, driving both the hardware development and the clinical translation — from proving that retinal microvasculature patterns can serve as a biomarker for arterial hypertension, to building multi-modal, multi-scale imaging platforms that capture retinal structure across different resolution regimes simultaneously. They are a product company with genuine research depth, not a pure research lab.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

IMAGINE EYES entered H2020 with a tightly scoped clinical validation goal — proving that retinal microvasculature imaging could serve as a non-invasive biomarker for systemic vascular disease like arterial hypertension. That first project (RetinArt, 2014–2015) was a small SME Phase 1 feasibility grant, consistent with a company testing a specific application hypothesis. By 2017 they had pivoted toward building a more ambitious and generalist imaging platform: MERLIN's multi-modal, multi-scale framing suggests they moved from a single clinical use case toward a broader technology infrastructure capable of supporting multiple downstream applications. The 38-fold increase in funding (€50K to €1.89M) confirms the transition from concept validation to full-scale innovation action.

IMAGINE EYES is moving from single-application clinical tools toward a platform imaging architecture, which positions them as a potential technology base for a wide range of ophthalmology and systemic disease research programmes.

How they like to work

IMAGINE EYES has coordinated both of their H2020 projects — they do not join other people's consortia, they build and lead their own. Their consortia are small (averaging 3–4 partners per project based on 6 unique partners across 2 projects), which reflects a company that brings a proprietary technology and recruits clinical or academic partners to validate it, rather than one that plugs into large multi-partner programmes. This pattern is typical of deep-tech SMEs: they own the IP and define the research agenda, with partners providing clinical access, end-user feedback, or complementary expertise.

Their consortium network is small but geographically spread — 6 unique partners across 5 countries, suggesting deliberate selection of the best-fit clinical or technical partners in Europe rather than reliance on a fixed national cluster. No evidence of repeated partners across projects, consistent with topic-specific partner recruitment.

What sets them apart

IMAGINE EYES occupies a rare niche: a commercial SME that both builds adaptive optics retinal cameras and leads EU research programmes using those cameras to solve clinical problems. Most actors in this space are either pure academic imaging labs or large medical device companies — IMAGINE EYES combines the technology ownership of the latter with the research agility of the former. For a consortium builder, they bring proprietary instrumentation, clinical translation experience, and proven ability to coordinate a European project from start to finish.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MERLIN
  The company's flagship EU project at €1.89M — a full innovation action building a multi-modal, multi-scale retinal imaging system, representing a major step from feasibility study to deployable platform technology.
• RetinArt
  An early-stage proof of concept linking retinal microvasculature imaging to arterial hypertension biomarkers — notable for bridging ophthalmology instrumentation with cardiovascular diagnostics.