Built by people who know light
Our founders are wired to solve problems. With backgrounds in light, color, computer vision, entertainment, the web, AI, and interactive media, they are the right team for this job. At Woloomo, they pooled their talents to tackle a new challenge: to give a bit of the color they love back to the world, through advanced, affordable, and integrated technologies.
Color is information. Most of us take it for granted — we glance at a shirt and instantly know it’s navy, not black, not purple. For the more than 300 million people worldwide who are colorblind, and the 1.1 billion with low vision or blindness (WHO, 2020), that instant is gone. Getting dressed without that information means relying on memory, labels, guesswork, or asking someone else. Every single day.
CueBe, our first release, exists to fix that. Not with a workaround or gimmick — with real, actual science and math.
“The camera on your phone is three channels. The human eye is three channels. A spectral sensor is twelve. Physics wins.”
Why this problem
“I look for problems where the critical path is genuinely hard to see — not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because nobody with the right combination of backgrounds has ever stood at the intersection long enough to draw the map. Deep tech, web, telecom, interactive, optical engineering, physics, business. I’ve never met anyone else who has all of that. So when a problem sits exactly at that intersection, I’m probably the only person who can build the right solution. CueBe is one of those problems.”
Why we could build this
Our founders’ philosophy is to take on big problems one core piece at a time — they have built companies that solved world-changing problems before, so this is not new territory. Spectroscopy, light-matter interaction, wavelength-resolved sensing — these aren’t new ideas. They’re what’s been used in materials science labs, agricultural sensors, and medical diagnostics for decades.
What changed is the leap in AI and hardware. Spectral sensor technology was lab-only just a few years ago — now we are able to put that capability into a pocket-sized, affordable device. We designed and integrated sensors, materials, software, AI, and expert systems into CueBe that would have cost a fortune just a year ago.
RGB cameras guess at color from reflected light. They’re fooled by shadows, tungsten bulbs, phone screens, and the color of the wall behind you. Our CueTrue™ spectral sensor measures the actual spectral signature of the material — twelve discrete bands from violet to near-infrared. It doesn’t guess. It reads at the molecular level.
The problem worth solving
Colorblindness affects approximately 300 million people globally — around 12 million in the United States alone. Add low vision and age-related sight loss, and over 1.1 billion people worldwide navigate a world designed for color perception they don’t fully have. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 1.9 million Americans specifically report difficulty with both vision and basic self-care tasks like dressing — that’s CueBe’s core audience, and they’ve been underserved for too long.
CueBe works in the dark. It works offline. You place a fabric on the sensor, press a button, and hear the color — spoken aloud, instantly, accurately. That’s it.
Who’s building it
Patrick Connolly is the founder of Woloomo. CueBe is his fourth company. The previous three each did something that hadn’t been done before. This one is the first aimed squarely at restoring human dignity rather than building infrastructure or spectacle.
Woloomo — Founder
Assistive technology for the visually impaired. Shipping CueBe and CUE, built on the CueTrue™ spectral platform.
Obscura Digital — Founder
One of the foundational companies in large-scale interactive and immersive media. Obscura’s work and technology became part of the backbone of the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas — the most ambitious immersive display project ever built.
MyEvents.com — Founder
Early social networking and event coordination, pre-Facebook. Raised $8M from Sierra Ventures. Acquired.
Colo.com — Founder
The original carrier-neutral colocation company. Raised nearly $1B from Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch during the original telecom infrastructure buildout.
First commercial SQL database server on the web
Before the modern internet had meaningful structured data, Patrick shipped one of the first commercially-deployed web-facing SQL servers. The web was almost entirely static text at the time.
How we build — accessibility as a first principle
Building for people with visual impairment and color vision deficiency means our product and every surface we publish has to meet a higher standard. We don’t treat accessibility as a compliance checkbox. We treat it as the core design constraint.
CueBe’s hardware and software are built on the following commitments, which we take seriously enough to publish explicitly:
If you encounter a barrier on any Woloomo property, or have lived experience and want to be part of our hardware testing, reach us at [email protected]. We respond to every accessibility report.
Why Woloomo
Woloomo is a small product company based in Holladay, Utah. We build things that solve real problems for real people, with the kind of care that only comes from being close to the problem. We’re not a lab. We’re not a VC-backed startup chasing a pivot. We’re builders who got frustrated that the right tool didn’t exist yet, so we made it.
CueBe is the first product under the Woloomo brand. It won’t be the last.
Questions? [email protected]