Meta and Snap It released new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put cameras and AI assistants on users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, startups like Even Realities are mingling with the giants.
Even Realitiesthe three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and previous backer Tencent; round valued the startup at $1 billion. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while competitors are chasing camera-equipped devices built around content capture and artificial intelligence, his company is betting on the first on-screen glasses that transmit data directly into the user’s line of sight without sacrificing privacy.
Even its previous backers are mainly high-profile Chinese names, including Sequoia China.
It was even created in 2023 by ex-Apple engineers. 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 and launched its first product. Even G1In 2024, Wang calls it the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market.
According to the company’s CEO, it even surpassed its 10,000-unit target to become the first company in the category to sell more than 10,000 products. 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 G2hit the market last November and skipped the camera altogether. Instead, a head-up display built into the frames transmits information to the user. even R1, users click and swipe to navigate.
While not the whole story, removing the camera is an important part of Even’s privacy philosophy, Wang continued. According to him, smart glasses are probably the most personal computing device that people will wear. When worn all day, they need to feel comfortable for both the wearer and those around them, so privacy is built into both the hardware and the software. Voice features such as translation to convert to text instead of saving audio recordings; user data is encrypted and the infrastructure is built to meet Europe’s strict privacy standards, Wang added.
Even its power users make heavy use of Conversate, a co-pilot that reads the conversation in real-time, explains unfamiliar jargon, or quickly feeds follow-ups, then syncs the summary to their phones.
Still, Even has invested the most in optics (the display and overall optical performance), which Wang says is what separates smart glasses from other consumer electronics.
“The screen on a phone or a watch 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 invest the most,” Wang said.
The company has developed a special optical technology called Even HAO or Holistic Adaptive Optics.
More than half of Even’s users are based in the US — its fastest-growing market — and so is a large portion of its developer community. Although the company manufactures in several factories there, it does not yet sell in China; its main markets are USA, Japan, South Korea, Middle East and Europe. “The demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we’re ready first,” Wang said.
It even sells near the top of the category for 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.” The frames retail for $599 before tax; prescription lenses or rings for another $200 to $300, pushing the average order to nearly $1,000.
This article has been updated with information about the company’s previous investors.
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