Smart glasses maker Even Realities has reached a $1B valuation with $150M in funding led by Meituan, Tencent.

Meta and Snap released new smart glasses last month, the latest sign of the industry’s rush to put a camera and AI assistant on users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, upstarts like Even Realities are swarming with giants.

Even Reality, a three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup, raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and former backer Tencent; the round made the initial value approximately $1 billion. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while competitors are chasing devices with cameras built around content capture and AI, his company is betting on preview glasses that send information directly into the wearer’s line of sight without sacrificing privacy.

Even the previous backers are top Chinese names – Hillhouse, Sequoia China, and Northern Light Venture Capital.

It was even started by former Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on Apple Watch and iPhone; the other co-founders are from tech, and two are from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The startup moved quickly, launching its first product, the G1, in 2024 as what Wang called the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market at the time.

It even surpassed its goal of 10,000 units to become the first company in the segment to sell more than 10,000 pairs, according to the company’s CEO. It raised capital faster than expected, and grew from 30-40 employees in 2024 to 300-400 today.

The first latest flagship, the G2, hit the market last November and skipped the camera altogether. Instead, a head-up display built into the frames feeds the wearer information, controlled by a companion ring, the Even R1, which users tap and swipe 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 probably the most personal computing device people will ever wear. Worn on the face all day, they must feel comfortable to the wearer and those around them, so privacy is built into both the hardware and software. Voice features such as translation transcribe audio into text rather than storing a recording; user data is encrypted, and the infrastructure is designed to meet strict European privacy standards, Wang added.

Even power users rely heavily on Conversate, a pilot that reads the conversation in real time, explains unfamiliar jargon or follows the feed on the plane, and syncs the summary to their phone.

Even so, Even has invested heavily in opticals (display and all-seeing functionality), which Wang says is what separates smart glasses from other consumer electronics.

“For a phone or a watch, the display is just a normal OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on physical displays, which require a completely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, optics, and waveguide together. This is where we invested the most,” said Wang.

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 medical support from scratch, rather than assembling separately designed components.

More than half of Even’s users live in the US – its fastest growing market – and so does the bulk of its developer community. The company does not sell in China yet, although it manufactures there in many factories; its major markets are the US, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. “The demand is significant, so we want to make sure we are prepared first,” Wang said.

It even sells near the top of the category on price and still delivers 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 did a survey and found that almost a third of our users are company executives,” he added. The frames retail for $599 before tax; prescription lenses or ring tack for another $200–$300, pushing the average order to around $1,000.