The company teaching ordinary cameras to see where you're looking - and turning that gaze into a way to control the world around you.
Blink's software-only eye-tracking engine runs on the RGB camera already in your phone, laptop, car or kiosk - photographed here as the mark it stamps on a hardware-free idea.
For decades, eye tracking meant a trade-off. To know where a person was looking, you needed dedicated hardware - infrared emitters, calibrated sensors, sometimes a headset strapped to the face. It worked, but it was expensive, intrusive, and it stayed locked in research labs and specialist rigs.
Blink Technologies, founded in 2018, took the opposite bet. Instead of building better sensors, it built better software. Its models read gaze from the plain RGB camera that already sits in phones, laptops, cars, ATMs and store-front CCTV. No headset. No add-on. No new hardware to buy.
That single design choice - software only - is what defines the company. It is why a driver's own dashboard camera can gauge attention, why a shop display can measure what a customer looks at, and why a kiosk can be operated with a glance instead of a touch.
Headquartered in Palo Alto with an R&D team in Haifa, Israel, Blink is led by CEO Oren Yogev, who previously sold Replay Technologies to Intel. The mission he describes is plain: simplify digital experiences across any device and any operating system.
Passive, non-intrusive, and built for the devices people already own
At its core Blink is a deep-learning company. Its engineers train convolutional neural networks to triangulate where the eyes are pointed from the appearance of the eyes themselves. The models are trained across age, gender and ethnic diversity so the gaze prediction holds up on real faces in real conditions - not just in a lab.
The result is a lightweight, compute-efficient engine the company calls its A-Eye approach: big, diverse data; physiological eye-modeling informed by neuroscience; proprietary machine-learning architectures; and deployment that runs on ordinary consumer devices across Windows, iOS, macOS, Android and Linux.
"Blink's software-only eye tracking solutions are a game changer."Natty Nashman · Managing Partner, INcapital Ventures
Software-only eye-tracking and gaze-estimation SDK built on lightweight deep-learning models that run on standard RGB cameras across five operating systems.
Touchless in-store technology that measures shopper attention and enables gaze-based engagement with displays and kiosks.
Real-time analysis, via EyePression tracking, of how viewers look at advertising and on-screen content.
Driver-attention monitoring and hands-free infotainment control using a vehicle's built-in camera.
Eye- and blink-pattern-based security, plus behavioral and visual acknowledgement analysis.
Gaze control for digital screens, kiosks, billboards and ATMs - contactless interaction with public displays.
Blink competes with hardware-based eye trackers - and skips the hardware
Established eye-tracking vendors such as Tobii, Smart Eye and Seeing Machines built their businesses around dedicated hardware and platforms. Blink's differentiator is that it needs none of it beyond a camera that already exists on the device. That lowers cost, widens where eye tracking can live, and lets customers deploy through software alone.
It is a harder engineering problem - a phone camera is noisier than a purpose-built sensor - which is exactly why the company invests so heavily in its models and diverse training data.
Blink licenses its eye-tracking software to device makers and to automotive, retail, advertising and security customers who embed it in their own products - a B2B software model that avoids the economics of manufacturing hardware. The company has raised roughly $24M across two rounds.
Oren Yogev and co-founders launch Blink Technologies to build software-only eye tracking, backed by a $7M seed round.
INcapital Ventures leads a $14M round with five other investors, bringing total funding to about $24M.
Blink details use cases spanning retail, automotive, advertising, authentication and touchless panels, and sets plans to grow the team.
Leads the company; previously sold Replay Technologies to Intel.
Heads the technology and deep-learning research behind the A-Eye engine.
Co-founder credited in company records alongside Yogev and Drozdov.
Video: no official Blink Technologies YouTube interview or product demo was found at publication - check blinkeye.com for the latest.
Profile compiled from public sources including blinkeye.com, Crunchbase, CTech and StartupHub. Figures such as team size and funding are approximate and reflect the most recent public reporting.