Share This Article
The race to make AI glasses actually wearable has a hidden bottleneck, and it’s not the AI chip or the camera sensor. It’s the tiny piece of glass sitting in front of your eye. A South Korean startup called LetinAR has spent a decade quietly solving that problem, and it just secured another $18.5 million to scale up as the market accelerates toward mass production.
In 2025, global AI glasses shipments hit 8.7 million units, surging more than 300% year-over-year according to Omdia. Analysts expect that figure to cross 15 million in 2026. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban smart glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple is reportedly preparing its own entry. Samsung is expected to unveil its first AI glasses co-designed with Gentle Monster at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are all moving too.
But all of those companies share a common problem: the optical module — the lens that projects images into your field of vision — is the hardest component to miniaturize without sacrificing brightness, battery life, or comfort. That’s where LetinAR comes in.
The PinTILT Difference
Founders Jaehyeok Kim (CEO) and Jeonghun Ha (CTO), friends since high school, launched LetinAR in 2016. The company’s core technology is called PinTILT, a proprietary approach to arranging microscopic optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go — into the user’s eye — rather than scattered in every direction.
To understand why this matters, consider the two dominant approaches to AR optics today. Waveguide technology, used by companies like WaveOptics (acquired by Snap for over $500 million), splits and spreads light across the full lens. The result is a thin lens, but an inefficient one — a lot of light gets thrown away, leading to dimmer images and faster battery drain. The alternative, a mirror-based approach called birdbath, delivers light more directly but is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit into a normal-looking frame.
PinTILT sidesteps that trade-off. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of each tiny element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor using less power. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life determines whether people actually wear the device, that’s the breakthrough the entire industry has been chasing.
Real Products, Real Customers
LetinAR isn’t just pitching a lab experiment. Its optical modules are already shipping to customers including Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook (formerly Toshiba Client Solutions), giving the company real manufacturing experience at scale. It is also in talks with Big Tech companies on next-generation AI glasses R&D, though it declined to name them.
One of its 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 that projects navigation, speed, and safety alerts directly into a motorcyclist’s field of vision — anchored to the road itself, not floating on a visor. LetinAR’s module is inside that helmet, which is targeting European and Swiss markets later this year.
The new $18.5 million round was led by Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, the venture arm of the South Korean retail giant, bringing LetinAR’s total funding to $41.7 million. The company is planning an IPO in South Korea by 2027.
The Bigger Picture
LG Electronics, which backed LetinAR in earlier rounds, has since begun developing its own AI smart glasses according to local Korean media — a signal that South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company sees the category as a genuine computing platform, not a niche accessory.
What makes LetinAR’s story compelling is that it reveals something about the AI glasses industry that gets overlooked amid the hype about multimodal LLMs and camera sensors. The optical module is the hardest piece of the puzzle, and companies that can deliver a lens that is thinner, lighter, and more power-efficient than today’s waveguide solutions will be the ones that enable the form factor breakthrough this market desperately needs.
“We see AI glasses as that next platform,” said CEO Kim. “And the optical module is the hardest part to get right.” If LetinAR’s PinTILT technology delivers on its promise, the company could become a critical supplier — not a flashy consumer brand, but the quietly essential component maker that makes the entire category work.
