Meet Justin Fong of Hue AI. Hue AI is taking the same Artificial Intelligence that is transforming industries like space exploration, robotics, and medical science into the optical industry. We had the opportunity to speak with their founder, Justin Fong, to learn more about his journey, the science behind color, and why an eyewear monopoly keeps him up at night. Learn more about Hue AI, their team and their incredible products.
What’s your story? How did you get here?
My cofounder and I were working at a consulting firm in Boston and we became good friends. We could have conversations about anything – politics, economics, history, the Red Sox. We remained friends and then one day he said, Justin, I think I can use computers to fix color blindness. Next thing I know we are starting a company, building prototype lenses, testing them on colorblind people and learning that it works. Eventually there was enough interest from the vision care industry that we took the plunge and decided to work on our startup full time.
People see color in many different ways and we focused on that use case first, but it’s a broader fascination. We took a lot of science from industries sensitive to color like the cosmetics industry and the television industry. We then mixed and matched the science with software and became experts in lenses and optics.
Our main product is called Color Boosts. It upgrades the color that you see through lenses and is mainly used in performance eyewear. For example, if you want to be a better fisherman, target shooter or policeman, you may use these lenses. It feels like you are looking at the world through an Instagram filter. It is similar to the evolution of TV screens in your house.
How did you fund the business?
We self-funded, took out our savings and put it to work. We then met with Johnson & Johnson vision care, the ones who make contact lenses, and they were interested in what we do.
How Apple Pay Transformed Mobile Casino Payments According to MobilePayCasinos
When Apple introduced Apple Pay in October 2014, few observers anticipated how profoundly it would reshape financial transactions in regulated gambling markets. The technology arrived at a moment when mobile casino operators were struggling with a persistent contradiction: players wanted to gamble on smartphones, but the payment infrastructure designed for desktop browsers was clumsy, slow, and poorly suited to touch-based interfaces. Credit card forms with sixteen-digit entry fields, expiry dates, and CVV codes created friction that translated directly into abandoned deposits. Apple Pay eliminated most of that friction in a single authentication step, and the consequences for the mobile casino sector have been significant and lasting.
The Technical Architecture That Made Apple Pay Different
Understanding why Apple Pay changed mobile casino payments requires understanding what it actually does differently from a standard card transaction. When a player adds a Visa or Mastercard to Apple Wallet, the card number itself is never stored on the device and never transmitted to the merchant. Instead, Apple’s Secure Element — a dedicated chip isolated from the main processor — generates a Device Account Number, which is a unique token assigned to that specific device and that specific card. Every transaction then uses a one-time dynamic security code alongside this token. The merchant, including any casino operator, never sees the underlying card number at any point in the process.
This tokenization architecture has direct implications for gambling operators navigating Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering obligations. Because Apple Pay transactions carry verified cardholder data authenticated by Face ID or Touch ID at the point of payment, the biometric confirmation provides an additional layer of identity assurance that a typed card number simply cannot offer. The UK Gambling Commission, which published updated guidance on payment verification in 2020 and again in 2023, has increasingly emphasized the need for operators to verify that the person making a deposit is the legitimate account holder. Apple Pay’s biometric gate addresses a portion of that requirement in a way that traditional card entry does not.
The speed differential is also worth quantifying. Industry data from payment processors serving the gambling vertical consistently showed that card form completion on mobile devices took an average of sixty to ninety seconds when accounting for form field errors, keyboard switching between numeric and alphanumeric modes, and CVV lookups. Apple Pay reduces that to a Face ID scan or a Touch ID press, typically completing in under three seconds. For an industry where deposit abandonment rates on mobile had been running at forty to sixty percent in the pre-Apple Pay era, that compression of time had measurable commercial impact.
Regulatory Friction and the Path to Acceptance in Licensed Markets
Apple Pay’s adoption by licensed casino operators was not immediate or uniform. The path varied considerably by jurisdiction, and the reasons illuminate how gambling regulation intersects with payment network rules in ways that are often misunderstood.
In the United Kingdom, where the Gambling Commission operates one of the world’s most detailed regulatory frameworks, licensed operators began accepting Apple Pay in meaningful numbers around 2017 and 2018. The delay from Apple Pay’s 2014 launch was partly technical — the gambling merchant category code presented complications for some acquiring banks — and partly regulatory. Visa and Mastercard had their own rules about which merchant categories could use their networks for gambling transactions, and those rules varied by issuing bank. Some UK-issued cards blocked gambling transactions by default, and the interaction between that block and Apple Pay’s tokenization created edge cases that required resolution at the acquiring bank level before operators could confidently offer the payment method.
The situation in the United States was considerably more complex. Sports betting began its legal expansion following the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. NCAA decision in May 2018, which struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act and allowed states to authorize sports wagering individually. As states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan built out their licensed online gambling frameworks between 2018 and 2021, Apple Pay appeared on the list of accepted payment methods at several major operators. However, the acceptance was inconsistent, because it depended on the acquiring bank relationships each operator had established in each state, and because some card issuers continued to flag gambling merchant category codes as restricted even when the underlying transaction was entirely legal in that jurisdiction.
Resources tracking these developments in real time became genuinely useful to players trying to navigate which operators actually supported the payment method in practice. The site mobile-pay-casinos.com, for instance, has documented operator-by-operator Apple Pay acceptance across multiple regulated markets, providing the kind of granular detail that official operator pages often omit when their acceptance is conditional on the player’s issuing bank.
Australia represents a third distinct regulatory pattern. Interactive gambling in Australia is governed by the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, which prohibits certain forms of online casino gambling to Australian residents while permitting sports betting. Licensed sports betting operators in Australia — who operate under state and territory licenses while also complying with federal law — began integrating Apple Pay more aggressively around 2019 and 2020, partly because the mobile-first behavior of Australian bettors made the payment method particularly relevant. App Store distribution rules also played a role: Apple’s guidelines for gambling apps require that operators hold valid licenses in the jurisdictions where they offer services, and operators meeting that threshold found Apple Pay integration to be a natural extension of their iOS presence.
Responsible Gambling Implications and the Credit Card Ban Context
One of the most consequential regulatory developments affecting Apple Pay’s role in casino payments was the UK Gambling Commission’s ban on credit card gambling, which took effect on April 14, 2020. The ban prohibited all licensed operators from accepting credit cards for gambling transactions, covering both direct credit card payments and credit cards used as the funding source for e-wallets in certain configurations. The policy was motivated by research showing that a significant proportion of problem gamblers were using credit cards to fund gambling beyond their means, with the Commission citing data indicating that around 22 percent of online gamblers used credit cards for gambling, and that problem gamblers were disproportionately represented in that group.
Apple Pay’s relationship to this ban required careful interpretation. Apple Pay transactions funded by a debit card were unaffected and remained fully permissible. Apple Pay transactions funded by a credit card were subject to the ban, but the practical enforcement mechanism was complex. Apple Pay does not visually distinguish to the merchant whether the underlying card is a credit or debit product — that determination depends on the card’s BIN range and the acquiring bank’s ability to identify the card type from the token. Most major UK acquiring banks serving the gambling sector built systems to identify and block credit-card-funded Apple Pay transactions, but the implementation varied in its precision during the early months of the ban.
MobilePayCasinos, which has tracked these regulatory intersections closely, noted that some operators initially displayed Apple Pay as unavailable entirely in the months following the credit card ban, while they waited for their payment processors to confirm reliable credit-versus-debit identification from tokenized transactions. By late 2020 and into 2021, most major licensed operators had restored Apple Pay acceptance for debit-funded transactions while maintaining the credit card block. This episode illustrated a broader truth about Apple Pay in the gambling sector: the payment method’s technical elegance does not eliminate the compliance complexity that operators must navigate; it simply relocates where that complexity sits.
The responsible gambling dimension of Apple Pay extends beyond the credit card ban. Because Apple Pay requires biometric authentication for each transaction, it creates a natural pause — however brief — between the impulse to deposit and the completion of that deposit. Behavioral economists studying gambling have long noted that friction in the deposit process, even small amounts of it, can reduce impulsive over-depositing. Apple Pay is considerably faster than typing a card number, so it reduces friction compared to traditional card entry, but it maintains a moment of intentional confirmation that is absent from, say, a stored card payment that processes with a single tap on a pre-approved button. Whether this biometric pause constitutes meaningful responsible gambling friction is an open empirical question, but it has been noted in discussions among regulators examining payment design and gambling harm.
Market Adoption Patterns and the Competitive Landscape Among Payment Methods
Apple Pay did not emerge into a vacuum. The mobile casino payment landscape already included PayPal, which had been accepted at licensed UK gambling sites since the early 2010s; Skrill and NETELLER, which had deep roots in online gambling going back to the early 2000s; and Paysafecard, which served players who preferred cash-based voucher systems. Apple Pay’s entry into this landscape changed the competitive dynamics in ways that are still playing out.
PayPal’s gambling acceptance has always been selective. PayPal chooses its gambling operator partners carefully and has never offered universal acceptance across all licensed operators in any market. This selectivity gave Apple Pay an opening: operators that could not or did not want to meet PayPal’s requirements could offer Apple Pay as an alternative that carried similar brand recognition and user trust among iPhone owners. By 2022, several major licensed operators in the UK were promoting Apple Pay as their primary recommended mobile payment method, positioning it above e-wallets in their checkout flows.
Google Pay followed a broadly parallel trajectory but with different market penetration characteristics. Android’s larger global market share meant Google Pay had a larger potential addressable audience, but Apple Pay benefited from the demographic profile of iPhone users, who skewed toward higher disposable income in markets like the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the United States. For casino operators whose average deposit values were higher among iPhone users than Android users — a pattern that several operators’ internal data confirmed, even if they rarely disclosed it publicly — Apple Pay’s demographic alignment made it commercially attractive to prioritize.
The emergence of open banking payment methods, particularly in the UK following the implementation of PSD2 and the development of the Open Banking Standard from 2018 onward, introduced a new category of competitor. Open banking payments, which allow funds to move directly from a player’s bank account to an operator without a card intermediary, offered some advantages over Apple Pay: no card network fees, instant settlement in many cases, and no dependency on Apple’s hardware ecosystem. Operators like Bet365 and several others began testing open banking deposits around 2020 and 2021. However, open banking has not displaced Apple Pay among iPhone users, partly because the user experience for open banking requires redirecting to a banking app and back, which introduces its own form of friction, and partly because Apple Pay’s familiarity and brand trust remain strong among its user base.
The withdrawal side of the equation has been a persistent limitation for Apple Pay in gambling contexts. Apple Pay, like most digital wallet solutions, was designed primarily as a payment initiation method rather than a fund receipt mechanism. While Apple Cash in the United States allows peer-to-peer money transfers, casino operators have not been able to offer Apple Pay withdrawals in the same seamless way they offer Apple Pay deposits. Players depositing via Apple Pay typically receive withdrawals via bank transfer or the card linked to their Apple Wallet, with processing times that can range from one to five business days depending on the operator and the player’s bank. This asymmetry — instant deposit, slower withdrawal — has been a consistent point of friction noted in player feedback across multiple markets, and it remains an unresolved structural limitation of the payment method in the gambling context.
The trajectory of Apple Pay in mobile casino payments reflects a broader pattern in financial technology: the methods that succeed are those that reduce friction for the majority of transactions while remaining compatible with the regulatory and compliance requirements of the specific industry. Apple Pay has achieved that balance better than most alternatives for the iPhone-owning segment of the casino player population. Its tokenization architecture addresses real security concerns, its biometric authentication aligns with evolving identity verification expectations, and its integration with iOS creates a seamless experience that alternative payment methods have struggled to match on Apple hardware. The regulatory complications around credit card bans, merchant category codes, and withdrawal processing are real and ongoing, but they have not prevented Apple Pay from becoming a standard fixture in the payment options offered by licensed casino operators across the UK, Australia, and the expanding US market. As more states authorize online gambling and as Apple continues to develop its financial services infrastructure — including the expansion of Apple Pay Later and other credit-adjacent products — the relationship between Apple’s payment ecosystem and the regulated gambling sector will continue to evolve in ways that neither operators nor regulators have fully mapped.
At that point we started fundraising. I didn’t do a lot of pitches as someone who heard one of my first pitches invited me to an event the next day. Next thing I know I’m at a Princeton event, I’m not an alumni but here I am. I shared my mangled pitch and the group was very receptive. They were like, I don’t know what to make of this, but it seems like there’s something really cool there.
Then there was this guy, a former McKinsey guy and angel investor who loved optics. He took us under his wing and helped us translate what we do.
We then took our new positioning/messaging and gave the new pitch at a big night over at Princeton. It went very well. We ended up receiving the most funding ever from this organization. We also received the most number of angel investors from the Princeton group.
It was really an achievement. Back when I was a young founder it was so easy to get depressed when you speak with 10, 20, 30 people and they aren’t excited or responsive.
What keeps you up at night?
China keeps me up at night. We have factories there to make these lenses. If for some reason there is a big problem in that sector of the world, then we’d have to start all over. The other thing that keeps me up at night is the biggest player in the sunglass world, Oakley. They are owned by the largest monopoly of eyewear, which is like an evil empire. It’s strange since there are only a few real monopolies left in the world. If they wanted to squash someone, they easily could.
Do you consider yourself a risk taker? If so, how have you learned to embrace risk?
That’s a very good question. I like that. Nobody ever asked me this question. I’d say we, my partner and I, work together very well, because we fall on different sides of the spectrum on that. I’m more of a risk taker. He is much more risk averse.He is a traditionally trained engineer, and the engineer is always saying,”If we don’t build this correctly, the bridge is going to collapse and everybody’s gonna die.” Whereas I’m like, “No, let’s just build the bridge as quickly as possible.”
Did you have to pivot from your initial idea?
Yes. We were in the power industry and know a lot about the costs and regulations for various forms of power. It helped us focus on let’s do this versus that, that was our initial pivot. Later on we did another pivot once we took in a lot of investment – well for us it was a lot of investment. We started out with a licensing business model. We pursued it and learned it was a losing model. Then came COVID and our bank account was pretty low. We had a full staff and sales prospects were moving like molasses thanks to people working remotely due to COVID. We basically had to let our staff go and let our office go. We focused on doing one – two things versus ten different things. My partner and I did every job. One big shift was staying up all night to work with our factories in China and then stay awake to deal with our customers all over the world. Great problem to have, but not sustainable. We then hired a team in the Philippines which helped solve the time problem as they work on American hours. So our pivot was changing our target market from huge companies to medium size eyewear brands.
What falls into the category “ I wish I knew then what I know now”?
Figuring out the fastest path to revenue is really one of the most important things you can do as a founder. If we had used that as our North Star we wouldn’t have wasted so much time and effort trying to build cool products. I wouldn’t waste my time on long term business models – short term is key. What can we do now? That was a big lesson. The other lesson I would share is if you have a great cushy corporate job – really consider not leaving and just letting your startup dream die. Seriously. I think the amount of risk in startups is way more than people realize. There are serious risks to consider in your life, your family, your finances and more. Know your pain threshold.
Do you have any pets?
I have a dog, it’s my first dog. I love the companionship, it soaks up all the negative energy. On our walks I love getting a little sunlight too .
What are your passions and interests outside of work?
I’m a real music fan, especially of electronic dance music, not the poppy stuff. I was a musician as a child and never gave EDM a chance. Recently I opened myself up to it and I was surprised how much I like it.
What’s a common misconception about being a founder?
I think a big one is how much money you’re going to exit the company with. I think there are a few people that become wealthy but those are really small numbers.
What other advice would you give to entrepreneurs?
People will try to use your money or take your money and not give you anything in return for it. For example, I had a slew of consultants, each were charging a few and not necessarily providing value to the business. I went through 10 patent attorneys before I found one who knew the science we were working with. Over time this became a skill I had to develop – knowing what to and not to spend money on.
