Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 100 miles per hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road ahead, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet and a lens the size of a thumbnail.
This is not a concept video. It’s headed to European roads as early as this year. And it’s a first look at where smart glasses are headed.
In recent years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets. Meta sells with AI enabled Ray-Ban glasses from 2023Google is build Android XRand Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung was according to information is set to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. of China Huawei, alibaba, Xiaomi and others are also moving.
The numbers reflect the momentum. Global shipments of artificial intelligence glasses grew to 8.7 million units in 2025, up more than 300% from the previous year, and analysts predict that number will exceed 15 million this year. per Omdia.
Suppliers and manufacturers of AI smart glasses components are also positioning themselves for what’s next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LetinARspent the last decade building 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 is an indication of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company is taking the category.
CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, co-founded LetinAR in 2016.
The lens that makes it wearable
LetinAR does not make the glasses. It makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the tiny lens element that projects images into your field of vision, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It needs to be light, thin and energy efficient, while still delivering a crisp, clear image. Getting all this right in a single component small enough to fit inside a regular-looking chassis is the central engineering challenge of 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 get right, as AI glasses makers will need a lens that’s thinner, lighter and more efficient than what exists today.”
The co-founders said LetineAR wants to be the company eyeglass manufacturers call. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way of arranging tiny optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed exactly where it’s needed, at the user’s eye, instead of being scattered in all directions.
Think of a television. It casts light across an entire room, but only the light that reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly a dominant approach called waveguideact a bit like that TV, splitting and spreading light across the lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin, but ineffective lens. A lot of light is thrown away before it ever reaches the eye, which means dimmer images and, crucially, a quickly draining battery, Ha explained.
The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as bird bathit brings light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside anything resembling a regular pair of glasses.
PinTILT bypasses that trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully designing the angle of each tiny element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form, using less power. In a category where every gram and hour of battery life matters, this is the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.
In the space, there are a number of peers such as WaveOptics, DigiLens and Lumus.
Customers
Its units are already shipping. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its clients, giving the company real experience building at scale. It is in talks with Big Tech companies about R&D of next-generation artificial intelligence glasses, although it declined to name them.
One of LetinAR’s most demanding customers is Aegis Ridera Swiss deep-tech company that came out of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety alerts directly in the motorcycle rider’s field of vision, not floating on the visor, but anchored to the road itself, as if the information is painted on the world ahead.
The LetinAR module is located inside the helmet. The Aegis Rider targets the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total to $41.7 million, will go toward scaling as the AI glasses market shifts from early adopters to mass production, Kim said, adding that hardware devices such as AI glasses are the next level to bring AI into everyday life.
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