North Carolina has increasingly become a destination for retirees in the U.S., now ranking just behind Florida as the top retirement location in the country. That influx of older Americans means more North Carolinians will be grappling with hearing loss. A start-up in a small town east of Raleigh has created a high-tech product that can help them: captioning glasses that instantly turn human speech into text projected on the glasses' lenses.
The team behind XanderGlasses are husband and wife. Alex and Marilyn Westner began the start-up in their cramped 900 square-foot Boston area apartment. The Westners relocated to Wendell in October 2024 where they continue to work out of their home, which is triple the size of their New England digs. The company rents a co-working space in Raleigh for occasional meetings. One of the benefits of having a more spacious living space is that they have room for work benches to use for charging and testing the glasses. The testing involves listening to NPR podcasts and the sermons of the Houston-based televangelist Joel Osteen.
"This product has to be simple," said Alex. "If it's any more complicated than 'push a button,' our population is just not going to be able to use it."
"We work with a lot of older adults who live in rural areas and a lot of people don't have Wi-Fi," Marilyn explained. "So, our glasses work as a stand-alone device. They don't need to connect to anything."
Other captioning glasses on the market must be paired with a smart phone that has Internet access.
Another population served by the captioning glasses is veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs has been buying XanderGlasses for vets suffering from hearing loss. The glasses cost $5,000 but, unlike other smart glasses being marketed to those with hearing loss, XanderGlasses do not have a monthly subscription fee.
Marilyn Westner said that in the past six months the number of VA Medical Centers buying the company's captioning glasses has grown six-fold. These include the Durham VA Health Care System and the Salisbury VA Health Care System. Revenue from the VA, and Xander's direct-to-consumer sales from its website, have increased four-fold since the company has relocated to North Carolina, she said.
Xander declined to reveal how many pairs of its captioning glasses are out in the world, and did not share an overall revenue figure.
The Westners' decision to move to the area was sparked, in part, by periodic visits Alex made to Raleigh for his job in Boston.
Despite a long career working for audio software companies, including Cakewalk and iZotope, Alex took a job with the Boston-based financial services company Fidelity Investments where he worked on product strategy and development as part of the company's innovation incubator, Fidelity Labs. Half of the Fidelity Labs team worked out of Fidelity's Raleigh office and during visits to Raleigh, the city struck him as a pleasant place to live and work.
"They had a good work-life balance," Alex recalled.
Upon his return to Boston Alex told Marilyn that, "There's some cool startup stuff happening in Raleigh and it's a lot less expensive."
"So, we came down here," she said. "And we kind of fell in love with it."
One of the highlights of their year in North Carolina was exhibiting at North Carolina State's Assistive Tech Expo Oct. 2 at the McKimmon Center. At the expo, they met the accessibility coordinator for the Thalian Hall Center for Performing Arts in Wilmington. He expressed interest in a possible pilot program to utilize the glasses at the theater. The Westners have met with representatives of the Morehead Planetarium at UNC Chapel Hill and the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh about the possibility of using XanderGlasses as an accessibility device for visitors to those institutions.
Since relocating to North Carolina, Xander hired its first quality assurance engineer, a computer science major at North Carolina State University. And it received an investment from the Triangle Tweener Fund, which invests in early-stage startups in the Research Triangle. Tweener is one of the largest and most active venture capital funds in the Southeast.
"Relocating here has been very good for the business," said Marilyn.
