The promise of reading what someone is thinking from how their eyes move has been a laboratory novelty for decades, useful for research papers and very little else. SOMAREALITY, a Vienna software company spun up in 2020, just raised over €3 million in an oversubscribed Series A to drag that science out of the lab and toward wearable glasses.
The round was led by Catalyst Romania, with existing backers MT-Lab, RDY Ventures, Moondust Ventures and Gateway Ventures following on. For Catalyst it is the 13th investment from its second fund and its third bet in Central and Eastern Europe outside Romania, the kind of detail that says the capital is staying in the region rather than fleeing to Berlin or London.
The company’s claim is that eye movements, the saccades and fixations the rest of us never notice, encode cognitive load, attention and fatigue, and that a few seconds of data is enough to read them. Co-founder Adrian Brodesser frames the next move plainly: having proven the science in B2B, the company now wants to sell it to “anyone who has always wanted to understand how their mind works but has never been able to outside of the lab.”
Here is where the skeptic should sit up. Consumer neuro-wellness is a graveyard of apps that promised to quantify your brain and delivered a coloured chart. The B2C pivot is the real risk, and SOMAREALITY is walking straight into it.
And, fine, the revenue is real. The company reports over €2 million in B2B revenue since its 2024 go-to-market, more than doubled in 2025, with customers in aviation, healthcare and professional sport.