The EIC Accelerator Backed RemmedVR's Lazy Eye VR: Did It Work

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is usually treated the same way it was a century ago: a patch over the good eye, worn for hours a day, so that the brain learns to use the weak one. Children hate it, many stop wearing it, and treatment drags on. RemmedVR, a Warsaw company registered in November 2016, set out to replace the patch with virtual reality goggles running eye-training games, which a child plays at home while an optometrist adjusts the exercises remotely.

In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 programme that became the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected RemmedVR's project PLUTO, according to the Commission's list of winners, which names RemmedVR as the only beneficiary. CORDIS records a grant-only EU contribution of €1,937,530 towards a total cost of €2,767,900, for a project that ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2022. Seven years after the award, the company still exists in the Polish register and keeps filing accounts, but its website has shown a domain parking page since 2024 and its last product news dates from March 2022.

Where RemmedVR Stands Now

On paper, RemmedVR is alive. The full extract from the National Court Register (KRS), current to 11 May 2026, shows no insolvency, liquidation or dissolution. In January 2026 a new member of the management board and a new supervisory board member were registered. On 11 May 2026 the company filed its accounts for 2025 together with those for 2023, which reached the register almost two years after the 2024 accounts had been filed in July 2025. The business data provider EMIS lists financial data up to 2025 and reports that total assets fell by 16.77%; the amounts themselves sit behind a paywall and could not be verified for this article.

In public, the company has gone quiet. Its website, remmed.vision, was live with a Polish and English product site until at least December 2023, according to the Internet Archive. From May 2024 the archive shows only a script that forwards visitors to a domain parking page, which is still the case in the latest capture, from March 2026. The site's blog stopped in March 2022. No news release, sales announcement or job advert from RemmedVR since 2022 could be found. Whether the company still sells its kit, and to whom, could not be established.

The Technology: Games Instead of a Patch

The kit consists of VR goggles, hand-held motion controllers, an app of therapeutic games, an online panel for the specialist and a tablet panel for the parent, according to the PLUTO final report on CORDIS. The specialist prescribes and adjusts the exercises remotely and sees the results in the cloud. Because a headset shows each eye its own image, the games can feed different pictures to the strong and the weak eye, a technique the company's Horizon 2020 project page describes as "independent left and right eye projections and isolation from external stimuli".

The pitch to the EU was speed and price. The CORDIS summary promised a system that would cut therapy "from six months to 90 days on average" and would be "available for at least half the price of standard vision therapy and 4 times cheaper than our competitors". Neither claim has been backed by published data. The Abu Dhabi Department of Health, which reviewed the product, recorded that it held a CE class I marking and was exempt from the US FDA's 510(k) clearance, and that the device was "not yet approved by FDA", unlike a competing VR therapy, Luminopia One, which won FDA De Novo authorisation for children aged 4 to 7 in October 2021, according to MobiHealthNews and CRSToday.

RemmedVR's own website called the software "certified as Class I Medical Device". Whether that marking was carried over under the EU's Medical Device Regulation, which has applied since 26 May 2021, is not public.

What PLUTO Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective set three tasks: adapt the VR technology to optometry, including "tailor-made eye tracking and hand tracking sensors"; move from pre-clinical tests to "full clinical trials"; and scale the business through a commercialisation plan. The final report, covering November 2021 to October 2022, describes the therapy system, then spends most of its length on a different product.

On clinical evidence, the report says only that a study of anisometropic amblyopia "found a significantly positive attitude towards VR rehabilitation compared to occlusion", a measure of acceptance, not of vision. The company had published a fuller account on its blog in July 2021: 50 children aged 4 to 10 were randomly split between patching and one hour of VR a day, five days a week, and visual acuity improved "comparable or better" in the VR group. The post, written by the company's lead optometrist, gives no numbers and announced "a larger and more complex study". The CORDIS results page lists five peer-reviewed papers: one case report on a single patient and four engineering papers on eye tracking and varifocal optics. No peer-reviewed report of the 50-child trial, and no larger trial, could be found.

1. VR therapy system with remote specialist controlDeliveredKit sold with CE class I marking, per the Abu Dhabi review and the company site.
2. Tailor-made eye-tracking sensorsPatentedUS patent 12,102,387 granted in 2024; no product with them has been launched.
3. Full clinical trialsNot deliveredOne 50-child study reported on the company blog; no peer-reviewed trial.
4. Therapy in 90 days, at half the priceUnverifiedNo published data on duration or cost.
5. Scale the businessNot deliveredNo funding round, sales figures or new markets announced; website parked since 2024.

PLUTO ran its full 36 months and CORDIS lists it as closed, with no sign of termination. That is to the company's credit. But the main result the EU paid for, clinical proof that the goggles work at least as well as the patch, never reached a journal, and the final report already pointed the company towards neurodiagnostics.

What RemmedVR Achieved Around the Award

PLUTO was not RemmedVR's only public money. In June 2017 the company received PLN 603,200 from the Polish National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR), with PLN 150,800 of its own contribution, through the SpeedUp Bridge Alfa fund, which then became a shareholder according to the KRS. From July 2019 to July 2023 it ran a second EU-funded project under Poland's Smart Growth programme to develop a goggle with a built-in eye tracker and optics that refocus automatically, with a value of PLN 9,894,823.29 and EU funds of PLN 7,113,851.31, according to the company's project page. CB Insights records a $2.63 million NCBR grant in June 2019, close to that project's total value. How much of the EIC and Polish grants was actually paid out is not public.

The commercial record is thinner. In 2021 the ITU, the UN agency for digital technology, named RemmedVR a winner of its Accessible Europe competition for people with visual impairments, and its profile listed US sales and more than 60 private clinics in the United States among the company's plans for 2021. No US clinic using the system could be found. In a review that set conditions for January to July 2022, the Abu Dhabi Department of Health approved the product only "for Testing / Pilot Phase", noting that the "promising results of VR-based training in amblyopia should be confirmed in more studies, including randomised clinical trials". No result of that pilot has been published.

The eye-tracking work did produce a patent. US 12,102,387 B2, granted on 1 October 2024 and assigned to RemmedVR, covers a headset that combines MEMS-mirror eye tracking, varifocal optics and a measurement of the eye's focusing response to test both refractive errors and signs of neurodegenerative disease. The application was filed on 23 April 2021, according to the CORDIS results page. No NeuroScreen VR product launch or clinical study has been announced.

The Money and the Owners

RemmedVR is not in the EIC Fund's portfolio of 326 organisations, all 17 pages of which were checked for this article; PLUTO was a grant-only award. No private funding round has been announced. The KRS records the ownership changes instead. Share capital rose from PLN 7,200 to PLN 17,800 in October 2022, as the EU project ended. In November 2024 two investors, Norma Investment S.à r.l. and Agencja Ratingu Społecznego sp. z o.o., left the register and Pro Bono FIZ, a closed-end investment fund, and Norma Investments PSA came in. In August 2025 SpeedUp Bridge Alfa left, and Pro Bono FIZ's holding doubled from 44 to 88 shares. The two founders hold 102 and 101 shares. The register does not show the prices paid.

The management changed too. The president of the management board registered since July 2019 left the board in June 2024, according to the KRS, which leaves the other founder, a board member since the company's registration, and the member added in January 2026.

Why Europe Should Care

Home treatment supervised at a distance is exactly what EU health policy wants to make easier. The European Health Data Space Regulation, in force since 26 March 2025, is meant to let health data move between patients, clinicians and digital health products across borders. At the same time, the Medical Device Regulation brought stricter classification rules for medical software. RemmedVR's story shows the gap between the two: building the product was the achievable part, and the randomised evidence that the Abu Dhabi reviewers asked for is where the record stops. A US competitor, Luminopia, won FDA authorisation in 2021 and went on to close a Series A round in 2023.

The Verdict

RemmedVR has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.