For years, "AI on your face" was a punchline that ran through Google Glass, a parade of failed hardware pins, and endless CES vaporware. This week it started to look like a business. Even Realities, a three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup founded by former Apple engineers, said on July 6 it had raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Chinese internet giants Meituan and Tencent. The deal values the company at roughly $1 billion, minting one of the few genuine unicorns in a category that has spent a decade searching for its market.
The timing is not subtle. Meta and Snap both rolled out new smart glasses in June, and reports surfaced days earlier that even SpaceX has an AI device prototype it has shown to investors. The face is suddenly the industry's most contested piece of real estate, and Even Realities is betting it can win a slice of it by doing less, not more.
The case against the camera
Where Meta's Ray-Ban line is built around a camera that captures photos and video, Even Realities has deliberately left the lens out. Its latest flagship, the G2, which shipped last November, has no camera and no recording hardware. Instead, a heads-up waveguide display built into ordinary-looking frames feeds text and information into the wearer's line of sight, controlled by a companion smart ring, the Even R1, that users tap and swipe to navigate.
"The future isn't about pulling out a device every time you need information," founder and chief executive Will Wang told TechCrunch. "It's about having the right information available exactly when you need it, while remaining fully present in the world around you."
That framing doubles as a competitive pitch. Wang argues that smart glasses are "probably the most personal computing device people will ever wear" — worn on the face all day, they have to feel comfortable to both the wearer and the people around them. Removing the camera, encrypting user data, and transcribing voice features like translation into text rather than storing audio are all, in his telling, part of designing privacy into the product from the start. The company says its infrastructure is built to meet Europe's strict data standards.
The wager is a direct contrast to the surveillance anxieties that have dogged camera-equipped rivals. It is also a technical bet. Wang says Even has invested most heavily in optics, developing a proprietary end-to-end design it calls Even HAO, or Holistic Adaptive Optics, that integrates the microchip, waveguide and prescription support together.
"With a phone or a watch, the display is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen," Wang said. "Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide together. That's where we've invested the most."
A market that finally shows up
The funding lands as shipment data suggests the category is, at last, real. The global smart glasses market grew 167% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, shipping 2.25 million units, according to IDC. Meta dominates with close to 70% share, trailed by Shenzhen's RayNeo and Xiaomi.
Even Realities is a smaller player, but a telling one. The company blew past its own 10,000-unit target to become, by Wang's account, the first in the category to sell more than 10,000 pairs. Staff has ballooned from 30 to 40 people in 2024 to 300 to 400 today. Its first product, the G1, launched in 2024 as what Wang billed as the lightest waveguide smart glasses then on the market; earlier backers include a roster of marquee China investors in Hillhouse, Sequoia China and Northern Light Venture Capital.
Notably, the economics look unusual for a hardware upstart. Even sells near the top of the category on price and still moves real volume, which Wang says makes it profitable. Frames retail for $599 before tax, with prescription lenses or the ring adding another $200 to $300, pushing average orders toward roughly $1,000. The customer base skews sharply: mostly male professionals aged 30 to 50, and by the company's own survey, about a third are company executives. More than half of users sit in the United States, its fastest-growing market. Even manufactures in China across several factories but does not yet sell there — "the demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we're prepared first," Wang said.
That the check comes from Meituan and Tencent adds a strategic layer. Both are betting on a hardware wave increasingly seen as the next platform after the smartphone, and Tencent, a returning investor, gets deeper exposure to a Chinese-built device selling into Western markets.
What to watch next
The open question is whether camera-free glasses can hold their ground as Meta, Snap and possibly SpaceX pour resources into richer, AI-first devices — and whether "privacy by design" remains a differentiator or becomes table stakes. Even says it will use the capital to build a next-generation platform, deepen AI integration and scale globally. Watch for how quickly it ships that follow-up, whether its executive-heavy niche can broaden into a mass market at $1,000 an order, and whether it eventually opens its home market in China. In a category that has produced far more hype than revenue, Even Realities has cleared the harder bar: it is actually selling glasses, and now has $150 million to find out how many more people want them.
"The future isn't about pulling out a device every time you need information. It's about having the right information available exactly when you need it, while remaining fully present in the world around you."— Will Wang, Founder and CEO, Even Realities