Picture this: You’re speeding down a highway on a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour. Suddenly, an arrow materializes in midair on the road ahead, guiding your next turn. No phone screen, no dashboard—just your helmet and a lens no bigger than a thumbnail. This isn’t a concept video. It’s expected to hit European roads as early as this year, offering a real glimpse into the future of smart glasses.

Over the past few years, major tech companies have been placing their bets—some quietly, others loudly. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is developing Android XR, and Apple is poised to enter the market. Last week, reports indicated that Samsung would unveil its first AI-capable smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. Meanwhile, China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and others are also making moves. The numbers reflect this momentum: global shipments of AI glasses surged to 8.7 million units in 2025, a more than 300% increase from the prior year. Analysts at Omdia project that figure will exceed 15 million this year.

Suppliers and component makers of AI-powered smart glasses are positioning themselves for what comes next. One South Korean startup, LetinAR, has spent the last decade developing optical technology that could make these devices truly wearable. Backed by LG Electronics, the startup just secured $18.5 million from Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, among others, ahead of its planned 2027 IPO in South Korea. LG Electronics, a previous investor, has since begun developing its own AI smart glasses, according to local media—a sign of how seriously the country’s largest consumer electronics company views this category. CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, friends since high school, co-founded LetinAR in 2016.

**The lens that makes it wearable**

LetinAR doesn’t manufacture the glasses themselves. Instead, it creates the critical component that makes them function. This component must be lightweight, thin, and power-efficient while delivering a sharp, clear image. Getting all of that right in a single part, small enough to fit inside a normal-looking frame, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. “We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the hardest part to get right, because AI glasses makers will need a lens that is thinner, lighter, and more power-efficient than what exists today.”

The co-founders say LetinAR aims to be the company these glasses makers turn to. Their technology, called PinTILT, arranges tiny optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go—into the user’s eye—rather than scattering in every direction. Think of a TV: it broadcasts light across an entire room, but only the light that reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly the dominant waveguide approach, work like that TV, splitting and spreading light across the full lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens but an inefficient one. A lot of light is wasted before it ever reaches the eye, leading to dimmer images and, critically, faster battery drain, Ha explained.

The alternative—a mirror-based approach known as birdbath—delivers light more directly to the eye but results in a bulky structure that’s nearly impossible to fit inside something resembling normal glasses. PinTILT sidesteps this tradeoff, Ha said. 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 while using less power. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life matters, that’s the problem the entire industry has been trying to solve. Competitors in this space include WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.

**Customers**

LetinAR’s modules are already shipping. The company counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook (formerly Toshiba Client Solutions) among its customers, giving it real manufacturing experience at scale. It is in talks with Big Tech companies about R&D for next-generation AI glasses, though it declined to name them. One of LetinAR’s most demanding customers is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech company spun out of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed, and safety alerts directly in a motorcycle rider’s field of vision—not floating on the visor, but anchored to the road itself, as if the information is physically painted on the world ahead. LetinAR’s module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.

The latest funding, which brings the total raised to $41.7 million, will go toward scaling up as the AI glasses market shifts from early adopters to mass production, said Kim. He added that hardware devices like AI glasses represent the next layer that will bring AI into everyday life.