Goal and Break launched new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and an AI assistant on users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, startups like Even Realities are closing in on the giants.
Even realitiesa three-year-old startup based in Shenzhen, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and its previous backer Tencent; The round valued the startup at $1 billion. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while rivals pursue camera-equipped devices built around content capture and artificial intelligence, his company is betting on display glasses that transmit information directly to the user’s line of sight without giving up privacy.
Even’s previous sponsors are mostly high-profile Chinese names, including Sequoia China.
Even was founded by former Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on Apple Watch and iPhone; other co-founders came from the technology sector and two from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The startup moved quickly and launched its first product, Even G1in 2024 as what Wang calls the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market.
It even surpassed its own goal of 10,000 units to become the first company in the category to sell more than 10,000 pairs, according to the company’s CEO. It raised money faster than expected and grew from 30 to 40 employees in 2024 to 300 to 400 today.
The latest flagship of the startup, Even G2It hit the market last November and skips the camera entirely. Instead, a front screen integrated into the frames provides information to the user, controlled by a complementary ring, the pair R1, that users tap and swipe to navigate.
Removing the camera is an important part of Even’s privacy philosophy, although it’s not the whole story, Wang continued. Smart glasses, he said, are probably the most personal computing device people will ever use. Worn on the face all day, they should be comfortable for both the wearer and those around them, so privacy is designed into both the hardware and software. Voice features, such as translation, transcribe audio to text instead of storing recordings; User data is encrypted and the infrastructure is built to meet Europe’s strict privacy standards, Wang added.
Advanced Even users rely heavily on Conversate, a co-pilot that reads a conversation in real time, explains unfamiliar jargon or provides follow-up on the fly, and then syncs a summary to your phone.
Still, Even has invested more in optics (the display and overall optical performance), which Wang says is what separates smart glasses from other consumer electronics.
“With a phone or a watch, the screen is simply a conventional OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category that relies on optical screens, which require a completely different technology; you have to design the microchip, optics and waveguide together. That’s where we have invested the most,” Wang said.
The company developed a proprietary optical technology called Even HAO, or Holistic Adaptive Optics, an end-to-end design that integrates the microchip, waveguide and prescription support from the beginning, rather than combining separately designed components.
More than half of Even’s users are in the United States (its fastest-growing market), as is most of its developer community. The company does not yet sell in China, although it manufactures there in several factories; Its main markets are the United States, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Europe. “The demand there is significant, so we first want to make sure we are prepared,” Wang said.
It even sells near the top of the category on price and still moves real volume, making it a profitable player in the space, Wang said. “Most of our customers are male professionals between the ages of 30 and 50. We did a survey and found that about a third of our users are business executives,” he added. The frames sell for $599 before taxes; Prescription lenses or the retaining ring cost another $200 to $300, bringing the average order to about $1,000.
This article has been updated with information about previous investors in the company.
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