Imagine riding a motorcycle going 160 kilometers an hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road ahead, telling you where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet, and an icon-sized lens.
This is not a concept video. It’s headed to the streets of Europe earlier this year. And a first impression of where smart glasses are headed.
Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (not quietly) betting . Meta has been selling AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is developing Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung was reported to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, designed in collaboration with Gentle Monster, at the Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are going with them.
The numbers show the intensity. Global AI glass shipments are expected to reach 8.7 million units by 2025, up more than 300% from last year, and analysts project that number will exceed 15 million units this year, according to Omdia.
Suppliers and manufacturers of AI-enabled smart glasses are also positioning themselves for what’s next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup called LetinAR, has spent the past decade developing vision technology that could make all of this wearable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup recently received $18.5 million from the Korea Development Bank and South Korean giant Lotte Ventures’ venture arm, among others, ahead of its planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.
Its former investor, LG Electronics, has since started making its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report, a sign that South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company is taking the segment seriously.
CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, founded LetinAR together in 2016.
A lens that makes it wearable
LetinAR does not make glasses. It does the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the part of the tiny lens that renders images into your field of vision, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a sci-fi headset or something you can actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It should be light, thin, and energy efficient, while still delivering a sharp, clear image. Fitting all that into a single component, small enough to fit inside a standard-looking frame, is a key engineering challenge across the industry. That’s what LetinAR is building.
“We see AI glasses as that 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’s available today.”
The co-founders say LetineAR wants to be the company that glasses makers call for. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way to arrange small optical elements inside the lens so that the light is directed exactly where it needs to go, to the user’s eyes, rather than scattered all over the place.
Think about TV. It spreads light throughout the room, but only the light that reaches your eyes is important. Most of the existing smart lens technology, especially the leading method called waveguide, works a little like that TV, splitting and spreading light across the lens to create a wide image. The result is a smaller, but less efficient lens. Most of the light is discarded before it reaches the eye, which means blurry images and, more importantly, a battery that drains quickly, Ha explains.
Another, mirror-based method known as birdbathing, brings light directly into the eye, but the structure is large, making it almost impossible to fit inside something like regular glasses.
PinTILT is leaving that trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of each tiny object inside the lens, LetinAR says it can produce a bright image in a thin, light way, using less power. In a segment where every gram and hour of battery life matters, that’s a 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 being shipped. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its clients, giving the company real experience in manufacturing at scale. It is in talks with Big Tech companies on R&D for next-generation AI glasses, although it declined to name them.
One of LetinAR’s most sought-after customers is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech company spun out of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider developed an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed, and safety warnings directly in the motorcycle rider’s field of vision, not floating on the visor, but embedded in the road itself, as if the information was literally painted on the world ahead.
The LetinAR module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total up to $41.7 million, will grow as the AI glass market transitions from startups 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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