Even Realities, the Shenzhen-based smart glasses startup founded in 2023, has closed a $150 million pre-Series B round at a $1 billion valuation, with Meituan and Tencent leading the raise, TechCrunch reported on July 6, 2026 in an exclusive interview with founder and CEO Will Wang.

Earlier backers Hillhouse, Sequoia China, and Northern Light Venture Capital participated in previous rounds. Wang previously worked on Apple Watch and iPhone hardware; two of the company's co-founders came from the luxury eyewear sector, one of them from Danish frame-maker Lindberg. That pairing — consumer electronics pedigree meeting optics craftsmanship — was deliberate, and it shows up directly in the product strategy.

The Hardware Bet

Even Realities launched its first product, the G1, in 2024, positioning it as the lightest waveguide smart glasses on the market at the time. The company says it sold more than 10,000 pairs, meeting its own unit target. By November 2025 it had shipped the successor, the G2, which takes a deliberately restrained approach: no camera, a heads-up display, and a companion input device called the Even R1 ring.

The absence of a camera is a notable design decision in a category where competitors have leaned into always-on capture as a key differentiator. The G2 is, by construction, a display-and-interaction device rather than a sensing platform — a narrower brief that sidesteps both the regulatory friction and the user-trust friction that cameras in eyewear reliably generate.

Underpinning both products is Even HAO (Holistic Adaptive Optics), a proprietary end-to-end optical stack that integrates the microchip, waveguide, and prescription lens support into a unified design. Waveguide integration with prescription correction has been one of the harder unsolved problems in consumer AR optics — most competing approaches treat prescription as an afterthought bolted onto a display system engineered without it.

Traction and Scale

The headcount numbers tell a straightforward growth story: 30–40 employees in 2024, 300–400 as of mid-2026. That is a roughly ten-fold expansion in roughly 18 months, consistent with a company that closed initial product-market fit and is now building out manufacturing, distribution, and software depth simultaneously.

Geography is worth noting. More than half of Even Realities' user base is in the United States, which the company identifies as its fastest-growing market. For a Shenzhen-founded, Chinese-VC-backed hardware company, a US-majority user base is commercially significant — it means the product has cleared the perception hurdle that Chinese-origin smart hardware still faces in the American market, particularly in a category adjacent to always-on wearables.

The Meituan and Tencent investment brings strategic depth beyond capital. Meituan's logistics and on-demand infrastructure and Tencent's platform and payments ecosystem are obvious distribution levers in China; whether either investor's network translates to meaningful US or European channel support is less clear.

Looking at what this round means for the broader wearable AR market: the $1 billion valuation is notable less for its absolute size than for the speed at which it was reached. Even Realities was founded in 2023, shipped its first product in 2024, and has now crossed the unicorn threshold before its third birthday. The consumer AR space has produced a long list of well-funded ventures that stalled between hardware prototype and mass adoption — Google Glass being the canonical case, but far from the only one. Even Realities has, at minimum, shipped units at scale and built a paying user base, which puts it past the stage where most predecessors stumbled.

In this author's view, the camera-free G2 strategy is the most interesting signal here. It reads as a deliberate choice to compete on wearability and daily-use comfort rather than capability breadth — a thesis that the first durable smart glasses category winner will be the one that people actually keep on their faces, not the one with the longest feature list. Whether that narrower product surface is an enduring strategic moat or a temporary positioning while optical and battery technology matures is the question the next product cycle will answer.

The funding will presumably accelerate Even HAO development and expand US market infrastructure. Wang has not publicly detailed specific deployment plans for the capital beyond what was reported in the TechCrunch interview.