Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | SEPTEMBER 8, 2025 11 STARTUPS, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION on the role. "I was drooling, practically, to come in and figure out how to take the investment, and work on whatever would be the groundbreaking thing to develop the technology," she said. One of the first things Demas suggested was changing the company name, Rothberg said. "Tesseract is a good idea, but identifeye tells you what we're going to do with the idea, and that was a critical transition," he said. "She came in and we went from Tesseract, a company that was extremely well funded, a company that had the right technology, and now we would bring it to the market with identifeye, and that's exactly what she's done with the recent FDA approvals." Elegantly simple The identifeye camera and tablet feature a sleek, clean design and are simple to use. The tablet provides written and verbal instructions in either English or Spanish, though Demas said AI will eventually allow it to add many more languages. AI also allows the camera to get the highest-quality images possible from each patient, she said. AI-directed prompts guide the patient through the exam, taking the responsi- bility away from the operator to make sure the patient is set up properly to have their eyes scanned, Demas said. "Now AI does that, so a couple minutes of training and you can actually run this, because it's meant to be intuitive," she said. "I tell people we wanted to make sure that retinal imaging is as easy as measuring someone's blood pressure." The device verifies each scan to ensure diagnostic quality. "From a claim perspective, we are capturing high-quality images that can be interpreted by a qualified person," Demas said. She added that, for now, images are uploaded to the cloud so they can be interpreted by a tele-retinal service. The company is generating some revenue, but this year's focus is on building interest in the product, Roth- berg said. Revenue will come from both software and hardware sales, with plans to expand into new uses over time. "We need to continue with that AI, because we want to go from diabetic diagnosis, which is one indication, to a general tool," he said. "There's no reason that you can't understand Alzheimer's by the eye, and there's some evidence for that. There's no reason you can't understand cardiac diseases." "AI is not magic," he added. "It's just the best method to do massive correlations." Jose Bscheider, a software engineer, works on the identifeye camera. HBJ Photo | Steve Laschever

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