Even Realities smart glasses have earned their unicorn badge, with the Shenzhen-headquartered startup closing a $150 million pre-Series B round led by Meituan and existing backer Tencent, valuing the three-year-old company at $1 billion. The round arrives as Meta and Snap both launched new smart glasses last month, turning what was a niche into a full-blown land grab.
Even Realities is not chasing the same prize. Where rivals are packing in cameras and AI assistants designed around content capture, Even is building display-first glasses that project information into the wearer’s line of sight. No camera, by design.
Even Realities Smart Glasses and the Privacy Bet
Founder and CEO Will Wang, who worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone before co-founding Even in 2023, frames the camera omission as a philosophy rather than a cost-cut. Smart glasses, he argues, are probably the most personal computing device people will ever wear, and privacy has to be designed into both hardware and software, not bolted on later.
Voice features like translation convert audio to text rather than storing recordings. User data is encrypted and the infrastructure is built to meet European privacy standards, Wang said. The Even R1 companion ring, controlled by tapping and swiping, means there is no voice command required to operate the Even G2, the current flagship, which launched last November.
The stickiness numbers back the pitch. Even Realities reports weekly active user rates exceeding 90%, according to TechFunding News, which is the sort of figure that makes enterprise hardware investors sit up. The power-user feature is Conversate, a real-time copilot that reads conversations, flags unfamiliar jargon, and syncs a summary to the wearer’s phone afterwards.
Optics First, Everything Else Second
Wang is blunt about where the company spends its engineering effort. ‘With a phone or a watch, the display is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide together. That’s where we’ve invested the most,’ he said.
The result is a proprietary system called Even HAO (Holistic Adaptive Optics), an end-to-end design integrating the microchip, waveguide and prescription support from the ground up. The earlier Even G1, launched in 2024, shipped with automatic brightness adjustment and up to 1.5 days of battery life on a full charge, and Wang positioned it as the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market at launch.
Even blew past its own 10,000-unit sales target with the G1, becoming what Wang says was the first company in the category to clear that threshold. The team scaled from 30–40 staff in 2024 to 300–400 today.
The business is already profitable, according to BigGo Finance, and sells through more than 400 high-end optical retailers globally. Frames retail at $599 before tax; add prescription lenses or the R1 ring and the average order lands at roughly $1,000. ‘Most of our customers are male professionals between 30 and 50 years old. We ran a survey and found that about a third of our users are company executives,’ Wang said.
More than half of Even’s users are based in the United States, its fastest-growing market, and roughly 80% of its developer community is American, per TechFunding News. The company does not yet sell in China, despite manufacturing there across several factories. Its active markets are the U.S., Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. ‘The demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we’re prepared first,’ Wang said of the Chinese market.
Meituan’s venture arm, Long-Z Investments, led the round. The unit has been active in Chinese AI and hardware bets this year, including leading Moonshot AI’s $2 billion funding round at a $20 billion valuation in May 2026. Earlier Even backers include Sequoia China and Tencent.
The fresh capital is earmarked primarily for Even’s next-generation platform, deeper AI integration, and scaling global operations, according to Road to VR. Whether that means a camera eventually enters the picture, or whether Even doubles down on the no-lens-no-lens-no-camera angle that has differentiated it so far, is the strategic fork that the next product cycle will have to answer.
