Reaching for new heights with Peek

Linking people without access to eye care to existing treatment and services is at the heart of Peek Vision, the company’s co-founder explains. 

The London social impact enterprise uses technology to address global health inequality. Products developed by Peek include a smartphone camera adapter that can be used for retinal imaging and the Peek Acuity vision testing app.  

The Peek school screening programme has tested the eyes of more than 100,000 children in Kenya, Botswana and India.

Peek chief executive officer and co-founder, Dr Andrew Bastawrous, highlighted to OT  that there are 2.5 billion people globally who are not accessing basic eye services.

“Our role is finding those people and linking them with appropriate services so that injustice is no longer an issue,” he elaborated. 

Dr Bastawrous, who trained as an ophthalmologist before studying public health, shared that Peek aimed to have a positive social impact while generating revenue. 

“In the long term for us to be strategic we need to be creating income by causing impact, rather than creating impact and finding income from another source, because then we are always split between looking for income and trying to cause impact,” he explained. 

Peek chief impact officer, Tim Carter, told OT  that Peek’s biggest innovation was in showing how a social objective could be met through a self-sustaining organisation.

Mr Carter shared his hope that in five year’s time millions of people would benefit from the work that Peek is doing in global eye care. 

“I think many of the main elements that allow enterprise and innovation to happen exist within eye health,” he highlighted. 

“We have a known problem set and we know many of the solutions. The innovative bit is how to take those solutions and solve the problems that we know exist,” Mr Carter concluded. 

Image credit: Rolex/Joan Bardeletti