Vivid Vision is a San Francisco medical technology company that turns virtual reality headsets into tools for vision care. Founded in 2014 by programmer James Blaha, who built the first prototype to treat his own lazy eye, the company started with VR games for amblyopia and strabismus and now runs two lines: a clinical and at-home vision therapy suite used in clinics across 50+ countries, and Vivid Vision Perimetry (VVP), a VR-based visual field test being adopted as a digital endpoint in pharmaceutical clinical trials for glaucoma, AMD, and geographic atrophy.
Shawn Dastmalchi is a serial healthcare-technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Gratia Health, an Austin-based startup that uses behavioral science and incentive design to keep nurses on the job. A UC Berkeley PhD in vision science, he co-founded and led Apixio, a clinical big-data company later acquired by Centene, then built Ark.one Health out of an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Sutter Health. Across 25-plus years in life sciences, medical devices and health IT, his throughline is turning messy clinical data into decisions - and, at Gratia, turning the daily grind of a hospital floor into reasons for nurses to stay.