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10 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | SEPTEMBER 8, 2025 Startups, Technology & Innovation Identifeye HEALTH CEO Vicky Demas displays a retinal scan on a tablet beside the company's camera. HBJ Photo | Steve Laschever Guilford biotech develops AI-driven system to diagnose diseases through the eye Finding a CEO While his startup was off the ground, Rothberg needed someone to oversee the day-to-day operations who understood both the technical and medical challenges. To create a new branch of diag- nostics, he said, "you really need an extraordinary CEO, because it's hard enough to lead a company with one domain, AI, or a second domain, radiology, but it's harder yet to have a company that can span multiple domains and then be practical." He found Demas, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Demas also spent more than three years working at Google X, the division with the mission to invent "moonshot" technologies intended to make the world a better place. She was a founding member of the division's Google Life Sciences team, which was later spun out to form Verily, where she led several teams and projects, including one involving retinal imaging. "Vicky was that person, because she had come from that Google AI world, but she also had that imaging background," Rothberg said. "So, she had a foot planted in the two areas." Demas said she was eager to take By David Krechevsky davidk@hartfordbusiness.com I t's said the eyes are the windows to your soul, but for Jonathan Rothberg and Vasiliki (Vicky) Demas, the eyes also are an observa- tion deck for your physical health. Rothberg and Demas are chairman and CEO, respectively, of identifeye HEALTH, a medical device company that has developed AI-powered software and a camera to screen the retina for diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease related to diabetes. The privately held company, which has 40 employees divided between Guilford and a facility in Redwood City, California, recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make its system commercially available. That allowed it to begin using the AI-operated retina imaging system to screen patients in partnership with Remote Area Medical (RAM), a Tennessee-based nonprofit provider of remote medical clinics, and the Mary- land-based Heart Health Foundation. The 15-pound identifeye camera, which bears a passing resemblance to a Star Wars droid, is built to be portable, user-friendly, painless and noninvasive. While its ability to help diagnose diabetic retinopathy is a significant achievement — 10% of the U.S. population has been diagnosed with diabetes, and 30% of those people have some form of diabetic retinop- athy, according to a University of Pennsylvania study — it's just the beginning of what this device can do. "Identifeye gave us the opportunity to invent a new branch of diagnostics," Rothberg said. "When you think of diagnostics, you think of two major branches — radiology, which is imaging, and then clinical chemistry, where they take your blood and they analyze what's in it. What I wanted to do was create a new branch of diagnostics that was synergistic between the two." That was possible, Demas said, because of the eye's anatomy. "The retina is a noninvasive window into the body, and health in general, beyond just kind of looking at ocular disease," she said. "The retina is the one part in your body where you can directly look at blood vessels and nerves. It's part of the central nervous system. So, there are a ton of disease biomarkers that now we can completely access noninvasively." That means identifeye's technology has the potential to eventually help diagnose not just eye diseases, but heart disease, Alzheimer's and more. That was Rothberg's goal for founding the company in 2018 when, he said, he had an idea to expand diagnos- tics and came up with "a silly name." Dimensional thinking If Rothberg's name sounds familiar, it's likely because identifeye HEALTH was not his first bioscience startup. He founded his first company, CuraGen, while still a graduate student at Yale University. CuraGen worked to develop drugs that targeted specific genes. He went on to invent a method for high-speed DNA sequencing, bringing it to market with his second venture, 454 Life Sciences. Other startups include Hyperfine Research Inc., which developed a portable MRI, and Butterfly Network, which developed a pocket-sized ultrasound device. Rothberg said his idea for a new diagnostic method was born from the same motivation as his other ventures. "My origin stories are always the same. Every single company I start, I start because I want to have something there when somebody I love needs it," he said. "And every single company I started since 2011 has been based on the fact that AI, artificial intelligence, now works." The idea to combine imaging with the ability to see the chemistry in the eye was not his own. For that, he thanked Google. "Google is an amazing company, but they have more ideas than they finish," Rothberg said. "I saw a paper, it said AI in the eye was going to be a big deal. Google didn't do anything with it." So, he formed his company and decided to call it Tesseract, which in geometry is a four-dimensional hyper- cube. "I called it Tesseract because we would look at multiple dimensions within the eye," he said. Armed with the Google paper and his new company, Rothberg was able to leverage that and his reputation to raise $90 million from investors, including Utah-based Foresight Capital. AT A GLANCE identifeye HEALTH Industry: Biotechnology Top Executives: Vasiliki (Vicky) Demas, CEO; Jonathan Rothberg, Chairman HQ: 530 Old Whitfield Road, Guilford Employees: 40 Website: www.identifeye.health Jonathan Rothberg