Even Realities Secures $150M at $1B Valuation to Challenge Meta and Snap in Display-First Smart Glasses Market]

Even Realities Secures $150M at $1B Valuation to Challenge Meta and Snap in Display-First Smart Glasses Market]

Even Realities, a three-year-old startup based in Shenzhen, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B funding round led by Meituan and Tencent, valuing the company at $1 billion. The funding comes as tech giants like Meta and Snap expand their presence in the smart glasses market with camera-enabled devices.

Founder and CEO Will Wang, a former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone and Apple Watch, positioned Even Realities as an alternative approach to smart glasses. While competitors focus on content capture through cameras and AI assistants, Even Realities emphasizes display-first technology that projects information directly into the wearer’s field of vision without compromising privacy.

The company’s first product, the G1, launched in 2024 and became the first in its category to exceed 10,000 units sold, surpassing the company’s own target. The team expanded rapidly from 30-40 employees in 2024 to 300-400 today.

The G2 model, released in November, omits cameras entirely and instead uses a heads-up display integrated into the frames, controlled by the Even R1 ring that enables navigation through tap and swipe gestures.

Privacy forms a core pillar of Even Realities’ design philosophy. Wang emphasized that smart glasses represent one of the most personal computing devices, requiring comfort for both wearer and those around them. Voice features transcribe audio to text without storing recordings, and user data is encrypted while meeting Europe’s stringent privacy standards.

The company’s Conversate feature, popular among heavy users, provides real-time assistance by interpreting conversations and suggesting follow-ups, syncing summaries to users’ phones. However, significant investment has gone into optics—the display and optical performance—which Wang identifies as the key differentiator from conventional consumer electronics.

Even Realities developed proprietary Holistic Adaptive Optics (HAO) technology, an end-to-end system integrating microchips, waveguides, and prescription support from the initial design phase rather than combining separately developed components.

U.S. users comprise over half of Even Realities’ customer base, making it the fastest-growing market. Despite manufacturing across multiple Chinese facilities, the company currently operates in the U.S., Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe, with no sales in China yet. “The demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we’re prepared first,” Wang noted.

Positioned at the premium end of the market, Even Realities achieves profitability through strong volume sales. The frames retail for $599 before tax, with prescription lenses and the ring adding $200-300, resulting in average orders around $1,000. Most customers are male professionals aged 30-50, with approximately one-third holding executive positions.

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