a tech startup cannot do without a cto on board.

When the daughter of serial entrepreneur Daniël Jansen, aged eleven, had to walk around with a taped eye for four hours a day to train a late-recognised lazy eye, he didn't simply accept it. He delved into the matter, and not much later the startup Vedea Healthware was born.

Its first achievement: an innovative method for training lazy eyes (amblyopia) in a child-friendly way with special vr games. An alternative to occlusion therapy – taping the good eye – which causes a lot of stress for children and their parents, and doesn't address the underlying problem.

Daniël discovered that research abroad had been showing good results for years with therapeutic gaming as a treatment for amblyopia. He got his friends Joël Wijngaarde (us.) and Teun Aalbers (Gainplay Studio) excited to join him in the startup adventure.

'My part is conceptual, I'm a creator and a seller – not a techie', says Daniël. 'Without Joël and Teun as partners, the Vedea method would not exist.' A dedicated cto is also essential for investors: they want to be able to rely on an experienced and committed technical director within the ranks, in the future too.

Virtually from day one, Joël has assisted Daniël with technical advice and support at cto level. Together with an experienced team of developers working from us., he is responsible for the complete technical architecture of the Vedea method.

The team ensures the games work well and communicate with a user-friendly online platform for practitioners, parents and other involved parties, in which all data sources are linked. Joël guards the big picture, ensures the scalability of the solutions and makes sure all technical choices stay aligned with the goal.

'I dream big and Joël looks at how we are going to make it feasible and scalable', is how Daniël sums up the collaboration.

The us. development team built the various components in weekly iterations, in close collaboration with Vedea and game designer Gainplay Studio. The api is built on NestJS and runs in a Kubernetes cluster; the frontends and tooling were made in Angular and run in App Engine. BigQuery analyses the collected data.

With the mvp delivered, Vedea Healthware has reached the stage of the first playtests and trials. In this phase, us. keeps a watchful eye through an sla, so we can act quickly if problems arise or adjustments are needed.