Meta and Snap rolled out new smart glasses last month — the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and an AI assistant onto users’ faces. As the rapidly growing market heats up, upstarts like Even Realities are muscling in on the giants.
Even Realities, a three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and previous backer Tencent, valuing the startup at $1 billion. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while competitors push camera-equipped devices built around content capture and AI, his company is betting on display-first glasses that beam information directly into the wearer’s line of sight without compromising privacy.
Even’s earlier backers include a roster of high-profile Chinese names, including Sequoia China.
The startup was founded by ex-Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone; other co-founders came from tech, and two came from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The company moved quickly, launching its first product — the Even G1 — in 2024 as what Wang calls the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market at the time.
Even blew past its own 10,000-unit target, becoming the first company in the category to sell more than 10,000 pairs. It raised money ahead of schedule and grew from 30–40 employees in 2024 to 300–400 today.
The startup’s latest flagship, the Even G2, hit the market last November and skips the camera entirely. Instead, a heads-up display built into the frames feeds information to the wearer, controlled by a companion ring — the Even R1 — that users tap and swipe to navigate.
Removing the camera is a key part of Even’s privacy philosophy, though not the whole story, Wang explains. Smart glasses, he notes, are potentially the most personal computing device people will ever put on. Since they sit on the face all day, they need to feel comfortable for both the wearer and those around them. Privacy is built into both the hardware and the software. Features like translation transcribe audio into text instead of storing recordings; user data is encrypted, and the infrastructure is built to meet Europe’s strict privacy requirements.
Even’s power users lean heavily on Conversate, a copilot that reads a conversation in real time, explains unfamiliar jargon, feeds follow-up questions on the fly, and syncs a summary to their phone.
Still, Even has invested most heavily in optics — the display and overall optical performance — which Wang says is what sets smart glasses apart from other consumer electronics. “With a phone or a watch, the display is just a standard OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack. You need to get the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide right together. That’s where we’ve invested the most.”
The company developed a proprietary optical technology called Even HAO (Holistic Adaptive Optics) — an end-to-end design that integrates the microchip, waveguide, and prescription support from the start, rather than combining components designed separately.
More than half of Even’s customers are in the US — its fastest-growing market — and so is the vast majority of its developer community. The company doesn’t sell in China yet, even though it manufactures there across several factories. Its main markets are the US, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. “The demand there is significant, so we want to be sure we’re ready first,” Wang said.
Even sells near the top of the category on price and still moves real volume, making it a winning player in the space. “Most of our customers are male professionals between 30 and 50 years old. We ran a survey and found about a third of our customers are company executives.” The frames retail for $599 before tax; prescription lenses or the ring add another $200–$300, bringing the average spend to roughly $1,000.
