A Shenzhen-based startup with roots in Apple engineering just crossed the billion-dollar threshold by going against the grain of the entire smart glasses industry. Where Meta and Snap are racing to put cameras on faces, Even Realities removed the lens entirely — and investors are pouring money in.

The company closed a $150 million pre-Series B round led by Meituan with participation from returning backer Tencent, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. That’s unicorn territory for a three-year-old company whose flagship product, the Even G2, ships without a camera. Instead of recording the world, it shows you information through a waveguide display built into the frame, controlled by a companion ring called the R1.

The pitch is simple: glasses that put a heads-up display in front of your eyes without making everyone around you feel like they’re being filmed. CEO Will Wang, a former Apple Watch and iPhone engineer, argues that removing the camera is a deliberate trust decision. Smart glasses live on your face all day, he points out, which makes them perhaps the most personal computing device anyone has ever worn. That intimacy demands a different approach to privacy — one that designs it into the optics and software from day one rather than bolting it on after a scandal.

Even Realities shipped more than 10,000 units of its first-generation G1 in 2024, making it the first company in the waveguide smart glasses category to cross that milestone. The G2 launched last November and has been the primary growth driver since. The company has scaled from 30-40 employees in 2024 to 300-400 today, a reflection of the sudden demand for functional eyewear that doesn’t double as a surveillance device.

More than half of Even’s customers are in the United States, the company’s fastest-growing market, followed by Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. The frames start at $599, with prescription lenses or the control ring adding another $200-300, bringing the average order to roughly $1,000. Despite the premium pricing, Wang says the company remains profitable — an unusual claim in a hardware category where most players burn cash chasing market share.

The company’s proprietary HAO optical system — Holistic Adaptive Optics — ties the microchip, waveguide, and prescription support together as a single engineered system rather than assembling off-the-shelf parts. That integration is what Wang believes gives Even a moat. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, he notes, which demand a technology stack entirely different from the OLED and LCD screens found in phones and watches.

The funding round signals that investors see a viable path for camera-free smart glasses even as the rest of the industry chases AI-powered capture and social sharing. Even’s most popular software feature is Conversate, a real-time copilot that listens to a conversation, surfaces explanations of unfamiliar terms, and delivers follow-up questions on the fly before syncing a summary to the wearer’s phone — no recording, no storage, just assistance.

With a billion-dollar valuation and a growing customer base, Even Realities is proving that not every pair of smart glasses needs to be a camera first. Some people just want information in their field of view, without having to wonder who else is watching.

Source: TechCrunch