Yuri Zhovnirovsky needed a break from the pool. An avid swimmer and water polo player, he spent too much time in chlorinated water. After college, he decided he needed another athletic outlet. After an interlude during which Zhovnirovsky tried competitive cycling, his neighbor dragged him back to the pool. It was a reunion tinged with disappointment. The familiar swimming frustrations came back to him.

“When I got back in the pool, nothing had changed,” he says. “I still had to count my own laps and strokes. It’s the equivalent of going for a run and having to count your own steps to figure out how far you’ve gone.”

After Zhovnirovsky’s bout with cycling, he was spoiled with fitness wearables that tracked a plethora of cycling metrics—like power, cadence, speed, and elevation. “You name it, they had it,” says Zhovnirovsky, who also worked in tech. When it came to swimming, there were no wearables that matched the accuracy of those tracking running or cycling. “I thought, ‘Well, I have the technology background, and I can see a solution.’”

The solution was an elegant one: smart goggles. Zhovnirovsky founded Ciye (pronounced “see”; it’s an acronym that stands for “coach in your eye”) to create smart goggles and bring them to market. In the Smart Goggle, a “smart coach” module snaps into the left corner of the left lens. The module has a small display showing swimmers their lap times, numbers of laps, and split times (time per lap), visible with a quick leftward glance. New features to track and perfect form are also in the works. Ciye’s Smart Goggle serves all swimmers, from amateurs to Olympians.

A Natural Solution

In his professional life, Zhovnirovsky is a serial entrepreneur. By the time he started swimming again, he had years of experience starting and scaling startups. He knew what was needed to develop the Ciye smart goggles solution. He also had a wide market to target. “In the US alone, there are 26 million people who go to the pool at least three times per week,” he says. And the lap-counting problems are a near-universal frustration. For example, one Ciye tester swims 9.5 kilometers (six miles) every day and before testing the Smart Goggle, she needed to mentally track her laps—all 422 of them.

“It’s an inherent issue. When you ask people how many laps they swam, most people will tell you they don’t know because nobody seems to be able to keep track beyond four laps,” says Zhovnirovsky. The inability to track progress during a swim also impedes a swimmer’s ability to improve. “If you talk to swimmers, their biggest complaints are performance-related: ‘I’m changing my style, but am I getting better? Faster? Am I getting worse?’” he says. “It’s very difficult to get information about how changes affect performance.”

While some devices like swim watches have tried to solve these problems, they have major drawbacks. For starters, the watch is worn on the arm, and the motion of the arm while swimming overwhelms the sensor. They aren’t very accurate at tracking laps, and if you want to check your pace, you need to move your wrist into view, disrupting your stroke. They also can’t provide real-time feedback during a workout.

Common sense told Zhovnirovsky that swimmers needed a solution integrated into something universal in the swimming world. “Everybody who swims wears goggles,” he says. “It was a very obvious answer.”