Niko Eiden

Niko Eiden is an engineer and technology executive who co-founded Varjo, the Helsinki-based maker of high-resolution virtual reality and mixed reality headsets, in 2016. He was Varjo's chief executive officer when the company launched its first headset, the Varjo VR-1, in February 2019, and held the post until August 2020, when he became chief experience officer (CXO) and remained on the board. Before Varjo he spent 14 years at Nokia, where, by his own account and that of his later companies, he worked on imaging and early augmented reality technology that became a foundation for Microsoft HoloLens.

In 2021 Eiden and Ville Miettinen, whom IXI also credits as a Varjo co-founder, left Varjo and founded Pixieray in Espoo, Finland. The company now operates as IXI and is developing autofocus eyeglasses that combine liquid crystal lenses with low-power eye tracking. Eiden is its CEO.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked Varjo, IXI and Pixieray roles and dates, the Nokia and HoloLens accounts, interview statements and all eight patent records against the cited sources. About review dates.

Early life and education

Few details of Eiden's early life have been published. Introducing him on the XR for Business podcast in September 2019, host Alan Smithson said Eiden holds a Master of Science in aeronautical engineering. In the same interview Eiden said he was working as an engineer during the 1990s, and that when he began his university studies drawings were still made with pencil on paper, while by the time he finished everyone had moved to CAD systems. A 2023 Amazon Science profile of IXI notes that he is also a pilot.

Career

Nokia and Microsoft

In a 2025 profile published by IXI, Eiden wrote that his path "started in mobile" and that he worked on devices including the Nokia 3310 and 3315, and that at Nokia he "contributed to early AR platform work that later became the foundation for Microsoft HoloLens". TNW reported in 2025 that he spent 14 years at Nokia on imaging and augmented reality technology. Patent records list him as an inventor on Nokia patents with priority dates from 2000 onward, including ones on a sliding cover for a device and on a headset.

According to the introduction to the 2019 XR for Business episode, Eiden held product leadership positions at Nokia and Microsoft, and in 2006-2007 he led a Nokia product program team that, together with researchers from Nokia Research Center, developed the basis for the optical technology later used in HoloLens. Speaking to the Japanese outlet Mogura VR at Mobile World Congress in 2019, Eiden said Nokia's research and development team had worked on mixed reality in 2006 and 2007 and had developed devices with the 2008 Beijing Olympics in mind, but Nokia never found a use case and no applications were built. He said he showed the technology to Microsoft's Alex Kipman in 2009, that Kipman was very interested, and that this led to HoloLens. These accounts of the HoloLens connection come from Eiden and the companies he has led.

Eiden has also described working on autofocus for mobile phone cameras at Nokia, where his team compared liquid crystal lenses with magnetic coil designs; he later drew on that experience for IXI. Microsoft is named as assignee on patents he co-invented with priority dates in 2015 and 2016. One of them, on tracking an object of interest in an omnidirectional video, also names Klaus Melakari and Roope Rainisto, who later co-founded Varjo with him. In the 2025 IXI profile, Eiden also listed work on machine learning and computer vision for automotive applications at AImotive.

Varjo

Varjo Technologies was founded in 2016 by Urho Konttori together with Niko Eiden, Roope Rainisto and Klaus Melakari, whom the Finnish entrepreneurs' federation's news service describes as former Nokia and Microsoft product directors; Lifeline Ventures provided the initial funding. Eiden has described the founding several times. In the 2019 podcast he said the founding team had long discussed video see-through headsets as a way to combine the strengths of AR and VR devices, while others warned that latency and resolution would be too poor. In the summer of 2016, after watching a high-fidelity demo on a first-generation HoloLens, he thought it would work better on a VR device with video see-through; he and Urho Konttori then built a first prototype in 24 hours that could darken a real room and add fog and virtual knights to it. Mogura VR likewise reported that Varjo was launched in the summer of 2016 with the goal of building the best possible mixed reality.

Konttori was Varjo's chief executive when the company announced its US$31 million Series B round, led by Atomico, in October 2018. By the time Varjo announced the VR-1 on 19 February 2019, a US$5,995 headset aimed at industrial users, Konttori was described as co-founder and chief product officer, and Eiden was the company's CEO. VentureBeat later put his time as CEO at "nearly two years".

In the Mogura VR interview, given at Mobile World Congress 2019, Eiden called the VR-1 a first model and only a beginning, and said enlarging the high-resolution central area was the next task. He argued that optical see-through displays are limited in how they render light and cannot make the view dark, whereas video see-through lets Varjo control the entire view. He said latency had been reduced to 50 ms ahead of the company's planned mixed reality module, and that Varjo then had 110 employees. In September 2019, discussing the Varjo XR-1 mixed reality developer headset, he said a complete setup for one designer, including a workstation, cost around US$10,000, and that price had not been the main barrier to adoption.

In a January 2020 interview with Road to VR, Eiden said Varjo did not plan to build its own platform ecosystem and would instead be a product company that earned most of its revenue from hardware. He said the goal was to make the headsets affordable enough that an employee could ask an employer for one in the way they might ask for a high-end monitor. He named Volvo, Audi, Saab AB and Siemens PLM among Varjo's "hundreds" of customers and said the company had about 150 employees, roughly half working on hardware and half on software. Varjo had raised about US$46 million by then and was raising a Series C round.

On 12 August 2020 Varjo announced that it had closed a US$54 million Series C round and appointed its president and chief operating officer, Timo Toikkanen, as CEO. The announcement said Eiden would "continue to drive the company's technological innovations as CXO and a board member". UploadVR reported that the round took Varjo past US$100 million raised in total. He is a named inventor on Varjo patents, including one on gaze-dependent display control in a display system with eye tracking and an optical combiner, and one on a wearable peripheral display apparatus. In IXI's 2025 co-founder profile, Eiden wrote that he and Miettinen "had just stepped away from Varjo" in 2021.

Pixieray and IXI

In June 2021 VentureBeat reported that Pixieray, a new company in Espoo, Finland, with Eiden as CEO, had raised a US$4.4 million seed round to develop eyeglasses that adjust their focus to what the wearer is looking at. The investors included Maki.vc, First Fellow, the Amazon Alexa Fund and firstminute capital, and the article listed Klaus Melakari as CTO and Ville Miettinen as chief algorithm officer. At the time the company expected to ship in 2023. By 2023 the product was called IXI. Amazon Science described a liquid crystal lens that changes its optical power on the fly, with camera-free eye tracking in the frame used to estimate how far away the wearer is looking. Eiden told the publication: "In some sense, the glasses that you're wearing are more than 100 years old at the moment."

IXI came out of stealth on 29 April 2025 with a US$36.5 million Series A round led by Plural. The company said the money would let it finish developing IXI Adaptive Eyewear and start commercial operations, and noted that Eiden and Miettinen had previously co-founded Varjo. Tech.eu reported that the eye tracking uses infrared sensors built into the lens plastic rather than cameras. Eiden told TNW that "None of the tech giants are fixing eyesight", and that they treated smart eyewear as a platform for AI assistants instead. In a diginomica interview he contrasted the two markets: "We realized that the eyewear market is kind of the opposite of VR/AR".

On 18 November 2025 IXI showed a prototype frame weighing 22 grams with all of its embedded electronics, not counting the lenses. On 30 January 2026 it signed a letter of intent with the French optical groups Atol and Vizio, which together represent more than 3,000 stores, to explore commercial pilots after regulatory milestones such as CE marking. At that point IXI said it had raised more than US$40 million and was still developing its first-generation product, which was not yet available for purchase or CE marked. The copyright notice on IXI's website named the company Pixieray Oy in early May 2025 and IXI Eyewear Oy from mid-2025 onward. Patents assigned to Pixieray that list Eiden as an inventor include one on an eyeglass lens with built-in eye-tracking components.

Selected patents

The table lists a selection of patents that name Eiden as an inventor, with the assignee and dates shown in the Google Patents records.

Number	Title	Assignee	Priority date	Granted or published
US 7,072,699 B2	Sliding cover	Nokia	2000-10-02	2006-07-04
EP 1 886 534 B1	Headset	Nokia	2005-06-03	2012-09-12
US 10,277,858 B2	Tracking object of interest in an omnidirectional video	Microsoft	2015-10-29	2019-04-30
US 9,768,541 B1	Plug receptacle for an electronic device	Microsoft	2016-08-10	2017-09-19
US 11,281,290 B2	Display apparatus and method incorporating gaze-dependent display control	Varjo	2020-06-17	2022-03-22
US 11,288,027 B1	Peripheral display apparatus and system	Varjo	2021-04-14	2022-03-29
EP 4 409 351 B1	Eyeglass lens with eye-tracking components	Pixieray	2021-09-29	2025-05-21
US 2023/0258936 A1	Optical elements with spatially-variable optical power	Pixieray	2022-02-11	2023-08-17 (application)

See also

• Varjo
• Urho Konttori
• Microsoft HoloLens
• Liquid crystal lens