Be My Eyes — AI and Volunteer-Powered Visual Assistance

Be My Eyes was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, who has retinitis pigmentosa, to connect blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video call for everyday tasks such as reading labels, checking expiry dates or navigating unfamiliar spaces.

In 2023 the app added "Be My AI", a GPT-4-based image-description feature that reached one million user sessions within about two weeks of its open beta. By January 2025 the company reported more than 750,000 blind and low-vision users and over 8 million volunteers across 150 countries. An enterprise version, co-published as a joint case study with Microsoft, is used in Microsoft's Disability Answer Desk, where the companies report the AI resolves cases in around four minutes versus twelve for a human agent, with a 90%+ resolution rate.

The company raised a $6.1 million funding round in January 2025, on its tenth anniversary, led by Enable Ventures with participation from the U.S. National Federation of the Blind.

Caveat: nearly all usage and impact figures — user counts, volunteer counts, AI resolution times — are self-reported by Be My Eyes or published jointly with its corporate partners (e.g. Microsoft). No independent, peer-reviewed evaluation of Be My Eyes' real-world impact on blind and low-vision users' lives was identified.

Read the full analysis: https://www.bemyeyes.com/