Meta And Instant launched new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and AI assistant on users’ faces. As the rapidly growing market heats up, new entrants like Even Realities are taking on the giants.
Even the realitiesa three-year-old startup based in Shenzhen, raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and previous backer Tencent; the round valued the startup at $1 billion. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while his competitors pursue camera-equipped devices built around content capture and AI, his company is betting on display-focused glasses that transmit information directly into the wearer’s field of vision without sacrificing privacy.
Even’s early backers are mostly high-profile Chinese names: Hillhouse, Sequoia China and Northern Light Venture Capital.
Even was launched by former Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone; other co-founders came from the technology sector and two of them came from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The startup acted quickly by launching its first product, the G1in 2024, as what Wang calls the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market.
According to the company’s CEO, 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. The company 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, the G2arrived on the market last November and completely ignores the camera. Instead, a heads-up display integrated into the frames provides information to the wearer, controlled by a companion ring, the Same R1, that users tap and swipe to navigate.
Removing the camera is an important part of Even’s privacy philosophy, but not the whole story, Wang continued. Smart glasses, he said, are probably the most personal computing device people will ever wear. Worn on the face all day, they must be comfortable both for the wearer and those around them. This is why privacy is built into both hardware and software. Voice features such as translation transcribe audio into text rather than storing recordings; user data is encrypted and the infrastructure is designed to meet Europe’s strict privacy standards, Wang added.
Even power users rely heavily on Conversate, a co-pilot that reads a conversation in real time, explaining unfamiliar jargon or populating follow-ups on the fly, then syncing a summary to their phone.
Yet Even has invested most heavily in optics (the screen and overall optical performance), which Wang says sets smart glasses apart from other consumer electronics.
“With a phone or a watch, the screen is just a regular OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require a completely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, optics and waveguide together. That’s where we’ve invested the most,” Wang said.
The company has 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 outset, rather than combining separately designed components.
More than half of Even’s users are in the US – its fastest-growing market – as are most of its developer community. The company does not yet sell in China, although it manufactures in several factories there; its main markets are the United States, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Europe. “There’s a lot of demand there, so we want to make sure we’re ready first,” Wang said.
It even sells near the top of the category in terms of price and continues to move real volume, making it a profitable player in the space, Wang said. “Most of our customers are male professionals aged 30 to 50. We conducted a survey and found that about a third of our users are business executives,” he added. Frames cost $599 before taxes; the prescription lenses or ring for an additional $200 to $300, bringing the average order to about $1,000.
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Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, covering technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She was previously a financial journalist at Mergermarket, covering mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital.