Ventures Helps Bring Camera to Life

You never know what will spark the next great idea that’s just waiting to be invented. For Eddy Lux, the spark was turtles.
Lux lives near the Central Canal Towpath, a picturesque waterside trail in Indianapolis. “Last summer with my 5-year-old, we were looking for turtles, but we didn’t see any,” he recalls. “The next morning, I saw hundreds, and I wished I had my phone to take a picture to show him.”

These days, of course, nearly everyone has a handy camera, built right into most mobile devices. Lux, however, is a runner who often runs with friends, and “a lot of us don’t carry phones,” he says. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, to have a small, minimalist camera, perhaps one that would clip on his sleeve like the old iPod Shuffle music player?

He looked online and didn’t find anything to his liking that offered good quality and an affordable price. So he and two partners decided to create their own, launching Snapz LLC in the fall of 2023. In early 2024, they called Rose-Hulman Ventures for help coming up with a prototype.

“The starting point was to get to a 3D-printed prototype to see if it could conceptually be done in the size we wanted and the style we trying to achieve,” he says.

With a model in hand, the group is proceeding with the entrepreneurial business of funding and the technological business of finalizing the product they’ve envisioned. “It gets us to a point where we know it can be done, and our next steps are how do we refine the design and the user experience, and how it will be used by our future customers,” he says. “We hope to raise some money and get to functional prototypes and test with the local user market.”

Lux has solid connections with the user market for this kind of device. “I’m really plugged into the running scene in Indianapolis, along with friends and family, and am continuing to refine and really focus on the running piece,” he says. But he sees the camera as useful for many other cases beyond running.

For example, he enjoys time exploring the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, which is pretty much the definition of being out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no wireless service, but incredible beauty waiting to be photographed, so right now he and fellow wanderers have to bring along their cellphones in Ziploc bags, hoping they can use them without ruining them. “A camera like what we are trying to do would replace that.”

After connecting with Rose-Hulman Ventures, “we worked with a few staff members and quite a few students,” he says. “We don’t live in the Terre Haute area so we would have meetings remotely, and we were really impressed with the students, their creativity and their ability to problem-solve. The staff was good about bridging the gap between us and the students, encouraging them and letting them take the lead on the calls.”

Rose-Hulman Ventures delivered the model, along with helpful advice, he says. “Rose was able to give us feedback on pricing with components. They provided different examples of components and capabilities and the pricing that’s out there. They provided several different design ideas we were able to use.”

Lux says he and his partners are pleased with where Rose-Hulman Ventures has taken them so far, and are eager for the steps ahead. “We’re three guys with an idea and a belief that it could work, and want to get to the finish line.”