Imagine you are riding a motorcycle at 100 miles per hour when an arrow appears floating on the road telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no board. Just your helmet and a thumbnail-sized lens.
This is not a concept video. This year it will reach European roads. And it’s a first glimpse of where smart glasses are headed.
In recent years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets. Meta has been selling AI-enabled devices Ray-Ban glasses from 2023Google is building Android XRand Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung was reportedly is set to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. China Huawei, alibaba, Xiaomi and others are also moving.
The numbers reflect the momentum. Global shipments of AI glasses rose to 8.7 million units in 2025, more than 300% more than the previous year, and analysts project that number will exceed 15 million this year. for Omdia.
Suppliers and manufacturers of AI-powered smart glasses components are also positioning themselves for what’s next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LetinARhas spent the last decade developing the optical technology that could make all of this truly portable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup just raised $18.5 million from the Korea Development Bank and the South Korean retail giant’s venture arm, Lotte Ventures, among others, ahead of its planned 2027 initial public offering in South Korea.
Your previous investor, LG ElectronicsIt has since started developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report, which is a sign of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company takes this category.
CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, founded LetinAR together in 2016.
The lens that makes it portable
LetinAR does not manufacture the glasses. It makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the small lens component that projects images into your field of view, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a pair of sci-fi headphones or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It has to be light, thin and energy efficient, while still offering a clear and sharp image. Getting all of that into a single component, small enough to fit inside a normal-looking frame, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. That’s what LetinAR is building.
“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the most difficult part to achieve, as AI glasses manufacturers will need a lens that is thinner, lighter and more energy efficient than those that exist today.”
The co-founders said LetineAR wants to be the company those eyewear makers call. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way of arranging small optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go, inside the user’s eye, instead of scattering in all directions.
Think of a television. It emits light throughout a room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart glasses technologies, particularly a dominant approach called waveguideIt works a little like that TV, dividing and distributing light throughout the lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin, but inefficient lens. A lot of light is wasted before it reaches the eye, which means dimmer images and, critically, a quickly draining battery, Ha explained.
The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as birdbathIt delivers light more directly to the eye, but the frame is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside something that looks like a regular pair of glasses.
PinTILT avoids that trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully designing the angle of each small element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor, using less power. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life matters, that’s the problem the entire industry has been trying to solve.
In space, there are several pairs like wave optics, DigiLens and Smooth.
Customers
Your modules are already shipping. LetinAR counts NTT QONOQ Devices and Japan’s Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its customers, giving the company real-world manufacturing experience at scale. He is in talks with big tech companies about R&D for next-generation AI glasses, although he declined to name them.
One of LetinAR’s most demanding clients is Aegis Ridera Swiss deep tech company created from the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety alerts directly in a motorcyclist’s field of view—not floating on the visor, but anchored to the road itself, as if the information were physically painted on the world ahead.
The LetinAR module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total raised to $41.7 million, will go toward scaling up as the AI glasses market moves from early adopters to mass production, Kim said, adding that hardware devices such as AI glasses are the next layer that will bring AI to everyday life.
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