Imagine you’re driving your motorcycle at 100 miles per hour and you see an arrow on the road ahead showing you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. All it takes is a helmet and a lens the size of a thumbnail.
This is not a concept video. It is expected to be launched on European roads as early as this year. And this is an early glimpse of where smart glasses are headed.
Over the past few years, big tech companies have been quietly (and not-so-quietly) making bets. Meta has been selling AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is developing Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market as well. Last week, it was reported that Samsung is planning to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at the Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are also making moves.
The numbers reflect momentum. According to Omdia, global AI glasses shipments will surge to 8.7 million pieces in 2025, up more than 300% year-on-year, and analysts predict that number will exceed 15 million pieces this year.
Suppliers and component manufacturers of AI-powered smart glasses are also preparing for what comes next. One of those companies, a Korean startup called LetinAR, has spent the past decade building optical technology that can actually make all of this wearable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup has just secured $18.5 million from Korea Industrial Bank and Lotte Ventures, the Korean retail giant’s venture arm, among others, ahead of a planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.
According to local media reports, previous investor LG Electronics has since started developing its own AI smart glasses, a sign of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company is taking the field.
CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha have been friends since high school and founded LetinAR together in 2016.
Lenses that make wearable possible
LetinAR doesn’t make glasses. These are the parts that make glasses work. The optical module is a small lens component that projects an image into your field of view, and is what determines whether smart glasses feel like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It needs to be light, thin, and power efficient while providing sharp and clear images. Getting all of this right in a single component small enough to fit within a regular-looking frame is a central engineering challenge across the industry. That’s what LetinAR is building.
“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the most difficult part to get right, as AI glasses manufacturers require lenses that are thinner, lighter, and more power efficient than what currently exists.”
The co-founders said LetineAR wants to be what eyewear manufacturers call a company. The company calls its technology “PinTILT.” This is a method of placing small optical elements within the lens so that the light is directed exactly where it needs to enter the user’s eye, rather than being scattered in all directions.
Consider television. It delivers light throughout the room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes is important. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly a key approach called waveguides, work similarly to a television, splitting light and spreading it across the lens to create a wide image. As a result, the lens becomes thinner, but less efficient. Ha explained that much of the light is discarded before reaching the eye, resulting in darker images and faster battery drain.
An alternative, a mirror-based approach known as a birdbath, delivers light more directly to the eye, but its bulky structure makes it nearly impossible to fit inside what looks like regular glasses.
PinTILT avoids that tradeoff, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that actually enters the eye and carefully designing the angles of small elements within the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce brighter images using less power and in a thinner, lighter form factor. In a field where 1 gram, 1 hour battery life is important, that’s the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.
There are many peers in this space, including WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.
customer
That module is already shipping. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook (formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions) as customers, giving the company extensive real-world manufacturing experience. The company is in talks with big tech companies to research and develop next-generation AI glasses, but declined to name the companies.
One of LetinAR’s most demanding customers is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deep tech company spun out of ETH Zurich’s computer vision lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet. This helmet displays navigation, speed and safety warnings directly in the bike rider’s field of vision. Rather than floating above the visor, it is anchored to the road itself, making it appear as if the information is physically mapped onto the world in front of you.
The LetinAR module is located inside the helmet. Aegislider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
The latest funding, which brings the total amount raised to $41.7 million, will help the company scale up as the AI glasses market moves from early adopters to mass production, Kim said, adding that hardware devices such as AI glasses are the next layer in bringing AI to daily life.
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