Imagine you are riding your motorcycle at 100 miles per hour and an arrow appears and floats on the road ahead, giving you the exact direction you are going. No phone, no dashboard. All you need is a helmet and a thumbnail-sized lens.
This is not a concept video. It is scheduled to hit European roads as early as this year. And this is a glimpse into where smart glasses are headed.
Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) betting. Meta has been selling AI-equipped Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple is also expected to enter the market. Last week, it was reported that Samsung Electronics plans to unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at the Galaxy Unpacked event held in London this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are all making moves as well.
Numbers reflect momentum. According to Omdia, global AI glasses shipments will surge to 8.7 million units in 2025, an increase of more than 300% year-on-year, and analysts expect this number to exceed 15 million units this year.
Suppliers and component manufacturers of AI-powered smartglasses are also preparing for the next phase. One of them, South Korean startup LetinAR, has been building optical technology for the past decade to make all of this actually wearable.
The LG Electronics-backed startup has secured $18.5 million from Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, the venture arm of the South Korean retail giant, ahead of a Korean IPO in 2027.
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 home appliance company is taking the sector.
CEO Jaehyuk Kim and CTO Jeonghoon Ha were friends in high school and founded RetinAl together in 2016.
Lenses that allow you to wear
LetinAR doesn’t make glasses. We make the parts that make the glasses work. Optical modules, tiny lens components that project images into your field of view, determine whether smart glasses feel like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. They must be light, thin, and power-efficient while delivering sharp, clear images. Getting all this right in a single component small enough to fit inside a modest frame is a key engineering challenge for the entire industry. This is what LetinAR is building.
CEO Kim said, “We see AI glasses as a next-generation platform.” “And the optical module is the most challenging part, because AI glasses manufacturers need lenses that are thinner, lighter, and more power-efficient than what exists today.”
The co-founders said they want LetineAR to become what eyewear manufacturers call a company. The company calls its technology PinTILT. This is a method of arranging small optical elements inside the lens so that light is directed in the exact direction it needs to enter the user’s eye, rather than being scattered in all directions.
Think of a TV. It broadcasts light throughout the room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes is important. Most existing smart lens technologies, especially the dominant approach called waveguides, work a bit like TVs, splitting and spreading light across the entire lens to create a wide image. The resulting lens is thin but inefficient. A lot of light is thrown away before it can reach the eyes, which means images become darker and, crucially, batteries drain faster, Ha explained.
An alternative to the mirror-based approach, known as Birdbath, directs light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside something that looks like regular glasses.
PinTILT avoids these trade-offs, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angles of each tiny element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce brighter images in a thinner, lighter form factor using less power. In a world where every gram and every hour of battery life counts, this is a problem the entire industry has been trying to solve.
There are numerous peers in this field, such as WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.
customer
The module is already shipping. LetinAR brings large-scale manufacturing experience to the company, whose customers include Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions. They are in discussions with big tech companies for research and development (R&D) on next-generation AI glasses, but their names were not revealed.
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 warnings directly into a motorcycle rider’s field of view as if they were anchored to the road itself rather than floating above the visor. It’s as if the information is physically depicted in the world in front of you.
LetinAR’s module is located inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
CEO Kim said that as the AI glasses market transitions from early adopters to mass production, this round of funding, totaling $41.7 million, will be used to expand scale. He added that hardware devices such as AI glasses are the next step in bringing AI into everyday life.
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