Meta and Snap unveiled new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is struggling to put a camera and AI assistant in users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, upstarts like Even Realities are sniffing out the giants.
Evmn Realitiesa three-year-old Shenzhen-based startup, 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 rivals are chasing camera-equipped devices based on content capture and artificial intelligence, his company is betting on screen-first glasses that transmit information directly into the user’s field of vision without sacrificing privacy.
Even its previous backers are mostly high-profile names in China, including Sequoia China.
Even was started by former Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on Apple Watch and iPhone. other co-founders came from tech, and two came from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The startup moved quickly, launching its first product, Even the 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 30-40 employees in 2024 to 300-400 today.
The startup’s latest flagship, Even the G2it hit the market last November and bypasses the camera altogether. Instead, a heads-up display integrated into the frames feeds information to the user, controlled by an accompanying ring, the Even R1, that users tap and drag to navigate.
Removing the camera is an important part of Even’s privacy philosophy, though not the whole story, Wang continued. Smart glasses, he said, are perhaps the most personal computing device people will ever wear. Worn on the face all day, they need to feel comfortable with both the wearer and those around them, so privacy is designed into both the hardware and the software. Voice functions such as translation transcribe audio to text instead of saving recordings. User data is encrypted and the infrastructure is built to meet Europe’s strict privacy standards, Wang added.
Even its power users lean hard on Conversate, a copilot that reads a conversation in real time, explains unfamiliar jargon or feeds the next ones on the fly, then syncs a summary to their phone.
However, Even has invested the most in optics (the display and overall visual performance), which Wang says is what separates smart glasses from other consumer electronics.
“With a phone or a watch, the screen is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first class of products based on visual displays, which require a completely different technology stack. You have to design the microchip, optical components and waveguide together. That’s where we’ve 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 ground up, rather than assembling separately designed components.
More than half of Even’s users sit in the US – its fastest growing market – and so does most of the developer community. The company does not yet sell in China, even though it manufactures in several factories there. Its main markets are the USA, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Europe. “The demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we are prepared first,” Wang said.
It even sells near the top of the class 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 conducted a survey and found that about a third of our users are company executives,” he added. The frames sell for $599 before tax. prescription lenses or the ring tack for another $200-300, pushing the average order to around $1,000.
This article has been updated with information about previous investors from the company.
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