This month, we had the pleasure of highlighting Anders Eikenes, co-founder and CEO of Oivi, a groundbreaking healthtech company bringing advanced retinal screening into primary care. From recycling systems to retinal imaging, Anders’ career has taken his companies from Oslo to Silicon Valley, and now to Florida, with one core theme running through it all: the power of optics to solve real-world problems.
Anders began his professional journey not as a healthcare innovator, but in advanced materials and imaging technologies. Early in his career at Tomra, he focused on industrial imaging and spectroscopy, helping develop technologies used in materials recycling and reverse vending machines across Europe and the US.
After 11 years in the recycling space, Anders moved into the fast-evolving world of video conferencing with the Norwegian firm Tandberg. The company grew to dominate the industry, eventually being acquired by Cisco. It was during this corporate chapter that Anders realized he had a different calling. “I didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur back then,” he reflects, “but looking back, I’ve always questioned the status quo.”
After 15 years in corporate life, Anders transitioned to entrepreneurship with the launch of Pixelparse Inc, a camera technology company based in Silicon Valley. While the venture ultimately closed, it offered invaluable lessons. Being in Silicon Valley gave him access to conversations across the tech industry, and through this network, he learned about unmet needs in the video conferencing space, including insights from major players like Google. That led him and his team start Huddly, developing a smart meeting-room camera with AI-enhanced image processing, which was later adopted as a core product for major video communication platforms.
And yet, something was still missing. Anders wanted to return to a space with more personal impact. “I’d done some X-ray crystallography in college, looking into the structure of proteins and viruses. That early exposure stuck with me,” he says. The intersection of optics and healthcare began to resurface, and this time, it led to something entirely new.
Oivi began with a conversation between Anders and a Finnish optical engineer friend, who highlighted the massive need for diabetic retinopathy screening—especially in India, where over 100 million people live with diabetes. With limited access to eye care, the risk of preventable blindness was high. Drawing on their imaging and optics background, the founding team set out to develop a camera solution tailored for primary care.
Today, Oivi is a health technology company specializing in advanced retinal imaging for early detection of eye diseases like diabetic retinopathy. By combining cutting-edge optics, robotics, and AI, Oivi aims to make high-quality retinal screening accessible and affordable, especially in underserved regions.
The goal from the start was clear: to create a compact, lightweight, fully automatic retinal camera that could deliver high-quality images at low cost. After testing several approaches, they began building their own system from scratch. The process proved to be far more complex than expected. Human eyes vary significantly from person to person, and the technical challenge of capturing consistently accurate images under real-world conditions required years of focused development.
By 2022, the company had finalized its core product, and in early 2024, Oivi registered with FDA to begin operations in the United States.
Oivi’s U.S. launch officially began in spring 2025, with Florida as its first and primary market. The team established a base in Port St. Lucie, strategically located within driving distance of major metropolitan areas like Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. With a high diabetes rate and a large elderly population, Florida offers both need and opportunity.
The product’s simplicity allows it to be seamlessly integrated into routine primary care visits. A screening takes only a few minutes and can be conducted by the existing clinic staff. For providers, this helps unlock insurance reimbursements and quality of care bonuses without the administrative burden of tracking whether patients followed through with specialist visits. By making screenings more accessible and less disruptive to patients and clinics, Oivi helps address one of the biggest barriers to early detection: inconvenience.
Florida remains the company’s core focus for now, though Oivi has also begun working with clients in South Carolina, Virginia and New York. Interest is growing among clinic chains, regional health groups, and national healthcare events, all signs of Oivi’s expanding reach.
Looking ahead, the team is exploring how its platform can be adapted to screen for other conditions beyond diabetic retinopathy. These include glaucoma and Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), both of which are major causes of blindness, especially among aging populations. Oivi is also aiming to use retinal imaging to predict cardiovascular risk, a development that could dramatically expand the scope of preventive care through the eye.
Oivi’s introduction to the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce Florida came through a recent hire, Albin Engström, who suggested that the Chamber could serve as a valuable platform for building awareness in the local community. This connection led to a collaborative business mixer event in May, where members of SACC Florida had the chance to learn more about Oivi’s mission and technology, and even try the camera for themselves.
Anders sees great value in being part of a Nordic business network. Shared cultural values like trust, openness, and collaboration have always played a role in how he leads and builds teams, and SACC Florida has offered a meaningful forum for connection and dialogue.
Anders is clear: this is just the beginning. “The U.S. healthcare system is complex, but the potential impact is enormous. Our goal is to empower primary care everywhere, from urban clinics to rural Alaska.”
And as for the future of retinal imaging? “We believe the eye will become a gateway to broader health insights. There’s so much more it can tell us, about the brain, the heart, and beyond. We just need to keep building.”
To learn more about Oivi and its mission, visit: https://www.oivi.co/
