Our mission is simple: to help people regain their focus, and with it, their progress, their productivity, and their happiness.
Our founder has lived with ADHD their whole life, and felt the same thing every time they sat down to work: every tool, every app was built to take their attention, not protect it. And they're not outgunned alone. Attention is the most valuable thing any of us own, and the one thing hundred-billion-dollar companies are paid to take. The apps designed to distract us are tuned by thousands of engineers. The apps meant to help mostly just block websites and hope for the best.
But blocking doesn't work, because the problem was never the website. It's the drift: the half-second your eyes slide to your phone, the tab you open “just to check,” the slow leak of a focused hour into nothing. You barely notice it happen. Then eight hours go by with almost nothing to show for them.
That's Focal. It uses your devices's camera and an on-device understanding of your screen to notice the drift the moment it starts, and a calm coach that knows you and your goals to bring you back. No blocking. No shame. Just a steady presence that keeps you honest, the way a good partner would.
And it doesn't stop at the nudge. Every hour you work, you can see how much you actually focused. Not a strict number, but every second analyzed and every behavior noted. Then Focal coaches you through it: what's pulling you away, what affects you most, and how to get a little better tomorrow.
We get it. A focus tool that uses your camera sounds like exactly the kind of thing you should be suspicious of. We were suspicious of it too. But after trying everything else, we kept landing on the same truth: seeing your attention was the only way to actually keep you accountable. Nothing else came close.
So we designed Focal from the ground up to earn that trust. Focal's face detection models run entirely on your device, which means your raw camera data never leaves your Device. No one to see it but you. The camera helps Focal understand your focus in the moment, and then it's gone.
Your face data. All of it stays on your Device. Privacy isn't a setting in Focal. It's the architecture.
No streak-anxiety, no guilt notifications, no manufactured urgency. A focus tool shouldn't add to the noise it's helping you escape.
Every bit of progress in Focal points back at the real outcome: deeper work and less phone, never a shinier distraction to keep you hooked.
A small team of makers, tired of finishing the day with a dozen half-read tabs and nothing to show for it. We'd tried every blocker. None of them changed the habit.
The breakthrough wasn't a stricter block. It was real-time feedback. A prototype that simply said “still with me?” when our eyes drifted changed how a work session felt overnight.
A camera-aware coach is only worth building if it's completely private. We rebuilt the whole thing to run on-device, so the feed never has to leave your Mac.
Now used by people doing their deepest work, from engineers and writers to founders and students, who wanted their attention back and a coach that's genuinely on their side.
Focal is free to try, takes a minute to set up, and private as a priority. See for yourself.