🔒2025 Innovator: UConn professor, serial entrepreneur Coles leads startup developing smart contact lens for aging eyes

Ryan Coles leads a Hartford-based company vying to create a smart contact lens, a venture that requires specialists in engineering, materials science and ophthalmology. Coles brings something else to the mix — experience starting companies and more than a decade of academic research into what it takes to turn an innovative product into a growing business. But his ambitions for the smart-lens company, called Pantera, are even bigger. “For the last 25 years, people looked at Cupertino and Apple to say, ‘What’s the next great thing?’” Coles said, referring to Apple’s California headquarters. “We think that with Pantera and our smart contact lens, people are going to start looking out to Hartford and saying, ‘What’s the next great thing coming out of Hartford and Pantera?’” The company has to clear several hurdles first, including clinical trials and approval from the Food and Drug Administration, said Coles, Pantera’s CEO and an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Connecticut. He is also chief strategy officer of a fintech startup called Nomyx. But he’s confident Pantera will be ready to launch its first commercial product in 2028: a daily-wear contact lens designed to help people with presbyopia, an age-related condition that limits the eye’s ability to focus on objects up close. People can address the problem with reading glasses, bifocals or progressive lenses. But a smart contact lens — essentially a battery-powered microcomputer for the eye — offers a discreet, dynamic, less awkward solution, Coles said. “I’ve talked to top people at all of the major vision companies who say, if you can nail a solution for presbyopia that people like, it’s an instant billion-dollar company.” Pantera — which employs 18 people, is headquartered in downtown Hartford’s Gold Building and has raised $2 million from friends and family — is not the only startup working on a smart contact lens, a technology that has been in various stages of development for years. But after plenty of false starts, commercial products are poised to hit the shelves. A Dubai-based company called Xpanceo, for example, is developing a lens designed to deliver augmented reality experiences to its wearers. Pantera is different, Coles said. Its first product will address a recognized pain point, rather than just putting a tiny computer on the surface of someone’s eye. And he believes, based on research by his business partners, that the patents behind Pantera’s technology are more commercially viable. The company’s name — the Spanish word for “panther” — is meant to evoke both nature and the subtlety of its eye-worn computing technology. Coles also expressed confidence in the team he’s assembled and their years of research behind the technology. Pantera’s leadership includes Chief Technology Officer Randy Pugh, who began developing smart contact lenses in the 2000s while working in Johnson & Johnson’s vision business, and Chief Revenue Officer Tracy Moody, former president and chief operating officer of optometry network Vision Source. “I’ve worked with a lot of startup teams,” said Coles. “I’ve never been associated with one where there was such a sense of purpose.”

‘True to form’

Coles found his purpose after co-founding Zaytoon International, a company that blended travel to the Middle East with opportunities to volunteer. “The value prop on the U.S. side was, ‘Hey, come see this region and you’re going to get a cool tourism experience, but you’re also going to get a chance to do something there that is meaningful,’” he said. For Coles, it was a chance to return to a region he had come to love while a student at Brigham Young University. He majored in Middle Eastern Studies/Arabic and spent a semester in Cairo, where he grasped the value of listening to different perspectives, even if he disagreed with them.

“I learned how to allow myself to walk around in somebody else’s shoes and just observe without judgment,” he said. “It really laid the seeds of my ability to participate in teams where we have to do something creative, innovative and challenging.” It was not his first adventure abroad. A former Mormon who grew up in southern California, Coles served as a missionary in Peru for two years, immersing himself in the country, its language and culture. The experience whetted his appetite for further travel. The timing for his first startup, however, was not the best. Zaytoon launched amid the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. “That was about the worst year to start a tourism business in the Middle East,” said Coles. Despite the chaos enveloping the region, Coles and his co-founders persevered for several years. Something about the experience stuck with him and provided the foundation for his turn to academia. “I noticed that the sociologists on our board of directors gave us better advice than the guys with MBAs,” Coles said. He returned to the U.S. with the goal of trying to understand the best ways to build businesses in emerging markets. He got a master’s degree in sociology from Brigham Young, then enrolled in a doctoral program at Cornell University under the direction of Pamela Tolbert and Wesley Sine, a sociologist studying entrepreneurship in Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. “We were like two peas in a pod,” Coles said, noting that Sine also had spent time in Cairo. “We immediately had a synergy.” Coles continued to travel during his doctoral studies, returning to do field work in the Middle East and Latin America but also touching down in China, Ukraine and other countries along the way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, he was trying to help businesses in Peru cope with the shift toward online commerce, not an easy feat for companies so dependent on real-world transactions. “Some business models just couldn’t adjust in time,” he said. Coles was on a plane from Egypt to Jordan when he got an email about interviewing for a job at UConn. He said he flew from Amman, Jordan, to Boston, landed in the middle of the night, hopped in a rental car and drove to the Storrs campus. “I woke up that morning, jet-lagged and did my job talk here,” he said. “But it was true to form. I think this is what they hired: The dude that was just somewhere in the world that would show up when needed.” Coles joined UConn’s faculty in fall 2020, when online learning was still in full swing. When students returned to the classroom the following year, they had to remain spaced apart. In both settings, Coles said he leaned on his creative side to keep students engaged — comparing online teaching to hosting a talk-radio show and striving to make his in-person lectures as lively as a Broadway performance while preserving their educational value.

“I woke up that morning, jet-lagged and did my job talk here. But it was true to form. I think this is what they hired: The dude that was just somewhere in the world that would show up when needed.” — Ryan Coles

Outside the classroom, Coles continued to travel. Notable adventures included a trip to a remote region of Nepal to consult with a factory making cheese from yak milk. At the same time, he was helping establish an entrepreneurship research center at UConn — now known as Daigle Labs — which opened in 2022. The center is named after Kyle Daigle, an executive at GitHub, a San Francisco-based company that offers a cloud-based platform allowing collaboration among software developers. Coles met Daigle, a Connecticut native and UConn grad, soon after relocating to the Hartford area. Coles was on a run and noticed the Tesla solar panels on the roof of Daigle’s home in Tolland. “While solar panels aren’t that out of the ordinary, the fact he recognized a particular brand of them caught my attention,” Daigle said in an email, noting that he found Coles to be “curious, outgoing and tech forward.” Daigle eventually agreed to help fund the lab based on a shared vision for helping students in Connecticut and entrepreneurs in nontraditional locations build businesses. “Half the time, the challenge is finding that right person to collaborate with and help build your ideas,” Daigle said. “You shouldn’t need to move to San Francisco, New York or Miami to find your people.” Check out other 2025 Innovator profiles

Leadership and technology

Smart contact lenses are not new, and plenty of patents exist for their components, said Michael Cantor, a founding partner of Cantor Colburn, a Hartford-based law firm specializing in intellectual property. But after meeting Coles in early 2025, Cantor decided to join Pantera’s board. He has grown increasingly confident that the startup has the right mix of technology and leadership. The company is benefiting from recent breakthroughs in miniaturization, materials, batteries and manufacturing methods, said Cantor, who has more than four decades of experience in intellectual property law. But it also benefits from Coles’ approach to leadership. Academics don’t always make great founders. But Coles effectively translates his knowledge of entrepreneurship and early-stage ventures into the real-world challenge of leading the Pantera team, said Cantor. Coles, for example, often cites academic studies in emails seeking advice from other company leaders on how to confront a particular hurdle. The citations offer solid support for what are essentially best practices in a given situation, Cantor said. The approach might sound pedantic. But Cantor said Coles excels at leading by consensus. “He’s a very good listener, and he’s very good at taking it all in from us before he gives his own ideas,” Cantor said, noting that the two men speak every day. “His conclusions are based on input from everyone.” Coles does not expect the company to need a lot of manufacturing space when it’s ready for commercial production. He calculates Pantera could make 10 million lenses in a 700-square-foot space. But, if the company can pull it off, the spotlight on Hartford is likely to be much bigger. “Putting an independently powered computer on the surface of the eye — if we can do that, and I’m confident that we will when we go into clinicals — will be a feat that’ll be on the cover of magazines,” Coles said. Check out other 2025 Innovator profiles