Even Realities, a Shenzhen-based startup founded by ex-Apple engineers, has raised $150M in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and Tencent, reaching a $1B valuation. Unlike Meta and Snap's camera-equipped smart glasses, Even's flagship G2 is camera-free and focuses on a heads-up display that beams information into the wearer's line of sight, controlled via a companion ring. The company has grown from 30–40 to 300–400 employees, surpassed 10,000 units sold, and counts the U.S. as its largest market. Its proprietary Even HAO optical technology integrates microchip, waveguide, and prescription support end-to-end. Frames retail at $599 with average orders around $1,000, targeting male professionals aged 30–50.
Nguồn: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/smart-glasses-maker-even-realities-hits-1b-valuation-with-150m-funding-led-by-meituan-tencent. 8sync News chỉ tóm tắt và dẫn link; bản quyền nội dung thuộc tác giả và nguồn gốc.
Luminvera, a Silicon Valley startup founded in March 2026, has pivoted from an AR wearable hardware product to pure B2B software targeting the robotics industry. Founder Lu Yang, a former Bosch and Mercedes-Benz IT project manager, built the company around the problem of engineers drowning in thousands of pages of flat 2D specifications when designing inherently 3D machines. The new product is an AI-driven spatial design workspace that converts dense specification documents into structured 3D constraints engineers can interact with directly. The pivot away from hardware was partly driven by Microsoft discontinuing HoloLens 2 with no successor, making hardware bets risky. Luminvera now competes against established AR/industrial software players like PTC, Scope AR, and Augmentir, but differentiates by targeting the design-stage engineer rather than the floor technician, and focusing specifically on robotics rather than manufacturing broadly. Yang presented the company at the Founder Institute's Silicon Valley Spring 2026 graduation.
Meta has launched smart glasses under its own brand for the first time, with the Adventurer and Fury models priced at $299 — undercutting the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 ($359) by dropping the licensing premium while keeping identical hardware. All models feature a 12MP ultrawide camera, 3K video, five-microphone array, and over 8 hours of battery life. AI features run on Muse Spark, Meta's new on-device model supporting voice queries, visual identification, and real-time translation in 20 languages. A third model, Starfire, designed with Kylie Jenner, costs $399. EssilorLuxottica remains the manufacturing partner. The move creates a two-tier strategy: Ray-Ban Meta retains fashion premium positioning while Meta Glasses offer a lower entry point. Meta and EssilorLuxottica together hold ~82% of the global smart glasses market, with 7 million AI-enabled glasses sold in 2025.