The first genius of Be My Eyes was not technical. It was social. Asking a friend to check the expiry date on a carton is easy once. Asking again to identify a shirt, read a thermostat and find the button on a washing machine can feel like a tax on both sides. Be My Eyes turned those tiny requests into an invitation. Open the app, point the camera and reach a sighted stranger who has already volunteered to help. The call may last two minutes. The effect is that a person can get on with the rest of the day.
That exchange began with Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired Danish craftsman who encountered the recurring need for quick visual assistance through his work with the Danish Association of the Blind. He presented the idea in 2012. When the iPhone app launched in January 2015, 10,000 volunteers signed up in 24 hours. Android followed in 2017. By March 2026, the company reported more than 10 million volunteers and one million blind and low-vision users across over 150 countries and 180 languages.
The waiting room is the whole planet. Someone, somewhere, is awake and willing to read the label.
A camera call with a very specific purpose
Be My Eyes sits at an unusual junction of consumer software, assistive technology, social infrastructure and enterprise customer service. For blind and low-vision users, the core app is free and unlimited. A request is matched with a volunteer who speaks the same language, using one-way video and two-way audio. The volunteer sees what the phone camera sees; the user remains in control of the conversation.
The range is mundane in the best sense. Users compare tins in a cupboard, sort mail, inspect a stain, understand a control panel or orient themselves in an unfamiliar room. The app does not promise to make every environment accessible. It supplies context at the moment an inaccessible label, interface or layout gets in the way. Before the service existed, the alternatives were often to guess, wait, call someone familiar or abandon the task.
“We develop our products ‘with’, not ‘for’, our community.”Be My Eyes, on its product values
Then the machine learned to answer back
In 2023, Be My Eyes added Be My AI, developed using OpenAI’s visual GPT-4 technology and tested with blind and low-vision people. Earlier image-recognition tools could list objects. The more useful trick was conversation. A user could photograph a refrigerator, hear a description, then ask which ingredients might make dinner. A cluttered shopping page could be summarized instead of recited element by element. The follow-up question turned recognition into assistance.
AI changes the timing and privacy of the request. It answers immediately, does not need a stranger to view the scene and can patiently revisit details. It also has limits: visual models can be wrong, and some situations benefit from human judgment or live guidance. Be My Eyes keeps all three routes available - conversational AI, community volunteers and specialist company representatives. The company’s position is less “AI replaces help” than “use the right kind of help for this moment.”
The free product has a paying side
A global volunteer network is a mission, but it also costs money to operate. Be My Eyes developed what it calls a purpose-and-profit model. Blind and low-vision consumers do not pay for the core assistance. Companies pay for accessibility products that sit on the same rails.
The Customer Accessibility Suite begins with a Service Directory, an accessible index of support contacts inside the app. Service Connect lets a customer reach a trained agent by video, so the agent can see the malfunctioning router, medicine package or hotel thermostat rather than asking the caller to describe an invisible problem. Service AI can handle a request using company-specific material and pass the conversation to a person when needed. Analytics and integrations make the package look less like charity and more like customer-experience software.
The business model in one sentence
Keep visual assistance free for the people who need it; charge organizations to make their support desks, workplaces and employee programs more accessible.
Microsoft was the first Specialized Help partner in 2018. Its Disability Answer Desk later combined Be My Eyes video support with an AI agent trained around Microsoft products. Be My Eyes reports that the deployment resolved 61 percent of requests through the smart agent alone, cut average handle time by 47 percent and increased support capacity by 75 percent. Those are company-reported case-study figures, but they clarify the sales pitch: accessible support can reduce friction and cost at the same time.
From the hotel room to the office desktop
The partnerships reveal where Be My Eyes thinks its market can go. Hilton placed its brands and contact options in the Service Directory, giving blind guests a route to trained agents or AI for room orientation and controls. Zain brought employees into volunteering across Middle East and Africa markets. Microsoft and Be My Eyes also collaborated on improving accessibility-focused AI data. Google, Procter & Gamble, Barilla, Sony, RNIB and the National Federation of the Blind appear among public customers or partners.
Meta moved the service off the phone. In late 2024, users in initial markets could call a volunteer by voice through Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The volunteer saw through the glasses while the user heard guidance through open-ear speakers. The advantage is wonderfully physical: both hands stay free for luggage, cooking, a cane or a guide dog. Later functions expanded across Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta devices.
In 2026, Be My Eyes introduced workplace products for a different kind of barrier. Workplace AI describes visual material, Workplace Reader analyzes documents, and Workplace Connect can route an employee to a trusted colleague or approved agent, with optional screen sharing and temporary remote control. The buyer is an employer trying to turn one-off accommodations into a predictable system. The user is an employee who would rather finish the form than file a ticket explaining why the form is inaccessible.
Its moat is not just the model
Be My Eyes competes with automated tools such as Microsoft Seeing AI, Google Lookout and Envision, and with Aira’s paid human visual-interpreting service. Friends, family and ordinary customer support remain the most common substitutes. Any large platform can add image description. It is harder to reproduce a multilingual volunteer network, years of accessibility-specific product learning and a community willing to test new systems.
That community is an advantage only while trust holds. A camera may reveal a home, a document or personal information. The company has said that Be My AI photos and descriptions are excluded from data-sharing for model training, and it introduced an opt-out before volunteer-call video data is shared for inclusive AI work. Its decision to combine automation with people also guards against a familiar product mistake: treating every visual question as if it carries the same risk.
The culture described by the company is built around making products with its community, moving quickly, owning details, learning from failure and keeping kindness and humor in the room. That wording matters because accessibility products have a history of being imposed as technical fixes. Be My Eyes gained credibility by beginning with a relationship, not a compliance overlay.
A decade of small doors opening
Funding has followed that widening scope. A $2.8 million Series A led by Cultivation Capital arrived in 2020. In January 2025, Be My Eyes announced $6.1 million through a Series A+ round and non-dilutive working capital from enterprise partners. Enable Ventures led, joined by ECMC Group’s Educational Impact Fund and the National Federation of the Blind, with earlier investors LiteCap and Samaritan Partners participating. The money was earmarked for enterprise AI adoption and continued global distribution of free consumer products.
The company’s market is broader than assistive apps and narrower than generic artificial intelligence. It is building an accessibility layer between a person and the visual systems of daily life: packages, websites, service desks, office software, hotel rooms and public spaces. Its expertise is not merely describing pixels. It is routing a visual problem to a form of help that can resolve it.
The enduring product is permission to ask a small question without turning it into a large favor.
That is also the useful lesson for other builders. Be My Eyes did not start by automating vision. It made the request legible, reduced the social cost of asking and gathered a community around a clear job. When powerful visual AI appeared, the company already knew what helpful answers sounded like. The model arrived late to a system that had been training itself, socially, for years.