Nathan
Kondamuri

Ask most founders what they sell and you get a noun. Ask Nathan Kondamuri and you get a verb: he sells the act of changing your mind about glasses. Pair Eyewear, the company he runs as co-founder and co-CEO from a building on West 27th Street in Manhattan, makes a plain base frame and then a small universe of magnetic "Top Frames" that snap over it. Florals on Monday. Team colors on game day. A new pair of glasses, more or less, every time the mood moves.

The business is built on a feeling Kondamuri can still describe in detail. He was eight when he got his first pair of glasses, and like a lot of eight-year-olds, he was sure everyone was looking. He was embarrassed to wear them to school. That sting - small, specific, ordinary - is the seed of a company that has now raised roughly $148 million.

Today the job is less about the sting and more about the scale. Pair has sold millions of Top Frames, grown revenue more than 30x, and pushed into adult eyewear after starting with kids. The Series C he closed in October 2023 - $75 million - was earmarked for something unglamorous and telling: automated manufacturing on U.S. soil. The kid who hated his glasses now spends his time thinking about lens labs and hinge durability.

The dorm-room arithmetic

The idea did not arrive as a thunderclap. It arrived as a conversation. At Stanford, Kondamuri - an engineering student from Munster, Indiana - told his classmate Sophia Edelstein the glasses story. She was studying human biology with a lean toward healthcare economics and medical devices. The two of them sat with an obvious question that nobody seemed to have answered: why are glasses, an object you wear on your face every waking hour, so boring, so expensive, and so joyless to buy?

Then they did the unromantic thing. They talked to more than 400 families. The pattern was loud and consistent: kids did not want to wear glasses, and parents dreaded the whole expensive, stressful ritual of getting them. The market research wasn't a slide. It was a diagnosis. Pair Eyewear, founded in 2017, was the prescription.

Into the Tank

In 2020, Kondamuri and Edelstein walked onto Shark Tank and asked for $400,000 in exchange for 10 percent of the company. They walked out with a deal. It was the kind of moment a hometown remembers - the Munster High School graduate, once a member of the DECA entrepreneurship club, pitching on national television with a few million already raised.

What followed reads like a funding ladder built in fast-forward. A $12 million Series A. A $60 million Series B and a jump into adult frames. The $75 million Series C. Backers came to include New Enterprise Associates and Prysm Capital. Somewhere in there, Forbes put Kondamuri on its 30 Under 30 list - the official stamp on a thing the 400 families already knew.

The two-headed CEO

Here is the quiet heresy. Most investors will tell you a company needs one neck to wring, one final voice, one CEO. Kondamuri and Edelstein run Pair as co-CEOs and have since the beginning. It is the structure conventional wisdom warns against, and they have spent years quietly proving conventional wisdom optional. The partnership is not a footnote to the Pair story. It is the operating system.

There's a neat symmetry to it. An engineer and a biologist. A product built from two parts - the base and the Top Frame - that only works when they snap together. Even the leadership is modular. Pull one piece off, the other still holds the prescription.

The recurring-revenue trick

The genius of Pair is not the frame. It's the second purchase. Traditional eyewear is a transaction you make once every year or two and then try to forget. Pair turned it into a habit. Buy the base, then keep coming back for Top Frames the way you'd buy a new shirt. A one-time medical purchase became a wardrobe you can see through. Kondamuri, the mechanical engineer, will happily talk about the magnets and the hinges that make it durable - but the real machinery is the business model.

That is the throughline from an embarrassed eight-year-old to a co-CEO scaling a U.S. lens lab: the conviction that glasses were never supposed to be one boring thing you settle for. They were supposed to be yours.