Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 100 miles per hour when an arrow appears, hovering on the road ahead, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet and a thumbnail-sized lens.
This is not a concept video. It is on its way to European roads already this year. And it’s an early glimpse of where smart glasses are headed.
Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) betting. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung was reportedly set to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are all moving as well.
The numbers reflect momentum. Global shipments of AI glasses rose to 8.7 million units by 2025, up more than 300% from the previous year, and analysts expect that number to cross 15 million this year, per Omdia.
Suppliers and component manufacturers of AI-powered smartglasses are also positioning themselves for what’s next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LetinAR, has spent the last decade building the optical technology that could make all of this actually wearable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup has just secured $18.5 million from, among others, the Korea Development Bank and the South Korean retail giant’s venture arm, Lotte Ventures, ahead of its planned IPO in 2027 in South Korea.
Its former investor, LG Electronics, has since started developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report, a sign of how seriously South Korea’s biggest consumer electronics company is taking the category.
CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, founded LetinAR together in 2016.
The lens that makes it portable
LetinAR does not make the glasses. That makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the tiny lens component 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 must be light, thin and power-saving, while at the same time delivering a sharp, clear image. Getting everything right in a single component, small enough to fit into a normal-looking frame, is the entire industry’s central engineering challenge. That’s what LetinAR is building.
“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the hardest part to get right, as AI glasses manufacturers need a lens that is thinner, lighter and more power efficient than what exists today.”
The co-founders said LetineAR wants to be the company that eyeglass manufacturers call. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way to arrange small optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed exactly where it needs to go, into the user’s eye instead of scattered in all directions.
Think of a TV. It emits light over an entire room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, especially a dominant approach called waveguide, work a bit like that TV, splitting and spreading light across the lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens, but an ineffective one. A lot of light is thrown away before it ever reaches the eye, which means weaker images and, critically, a battery that drains quickly, Ha explained.
The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as a birdbath, delivers light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit into anything resembling a normal pair of glasses.
PinTILT bypasses that trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of every tiny element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor using less power. In a category where every gram and hour of battery life matters, that’s the problem the entire industry has been trying to solve.
In the space there are a number of peers such as WaveOptics, DigiLens and Lumus.
Customers
Its modules are already shipping. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its customers, giving the company true large-scale manufacturing experience. It is in talks with Big Tech companies to research and develop next-generation AI glasses, although it declined to name them.
One of LetinAR’s most demanding clients is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech company spun out of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety warnings directly in a motorcycle rider’s field of vision, not floating on the visor, but anchored to the road itself, as if the information is physically painted on the world ahead.
LetinAR’s module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and the Swiss market in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total to $41.7 million, will go toward scaling up 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 layer that will bring AI into everyday life.
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