Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 100 miles per hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road in front of you, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your headset and a thumbnail-sized lens.
This is not a concept video. It is heading to European roads this year. And it’s a first look at where smart glasses are headed.
Over the past few years, Big Tech has placed its bets quietly (and not so quietly). Meta sells AI-enabled products Ray-Ban glasses since 2023Google is build Android XRAnd Apple should enter the market. Last week, Samsung was would have is set to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. China Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomiand others are all moving too.
The numbers reflect momentum. Global shipments of AI glasses jumped to 8.7 million units in 2025, an increase of more than 300% from the previous year, and analysts predict that figure will exceed 15 million this year. for Omdia.
Suppliers and manufacturers of AI-powered smart glasses components are also positioning themselves for what comes next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LétinARhas spent the last decade developing the optical technology that could make all of this truly portable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup just secured $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 IPO in South Korea.
Its previous investor, LG Electronicshas since started developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report, which shows how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company takes this category.
LetinAR CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, friends since high school, founded the company together in 2016.
The lens that makes it portable
LetinAR does not manufacture the glasses. It is 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 looks like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It must be light, thin and energy efficient, while providing a sharp and clear image. Bringing all of this together in a single component, small enough to fit into a normal-looking frame, is the central engineering challenge for the entire industry. This is what LetinAR builds.
“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the hardest part to make, because AI glasses makers will need a lens that is thinner, lighter and more energy efficient than what exists today.”
The co-founders said LetinAR wanted to be the company eyewear makers call it. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way of arranging tiny optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go, into the user’s eye, rather than scattered in all directions.
Think of a television. It diffuses light throughout an entire room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes counts. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly a dominant approach called waveguideworks a bit like this TV, splitting and distributing light across the entire lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin, but ineffective lens. Much of the light is rejected before it even reaches the eye, which means darker images and, crucially, a battery that drains quickly, Ha explained.
The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as bird bathdelivers light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it almost impossible to fit into something that looks like a normal pair of glasses.
PinTILT avoids this trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully crafting the angle of each small element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter format, using less energy. In a category where every gram and hour of battery life counts, this is the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.
In space there are a number of peers like WaveOptique, DigiLensAnd Smooth.
Customers
Its modules are already shipped. LetinAR counts Japanese companies NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its clients, providing the company with true large-scale manufacturing experience. He is in talks with major tech companies about R&D of next-generation AI glasses, although he declined to name them.
One of LetinAR’s most demanding clients is Aegis Ridera Swiss deep tech company spun out of the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich. Aegis Rider builds an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety alerts directly in the rider’s field of vision, 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 located inside the helmet. Aegis Rider targets EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total raised to $41.7 million, will be dedicated to development 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 into daily life.
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