Even Realities, a Shenzhen smart glasses maker founded in 2023, has raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, led by Chinese giants Meituan and Tencent. TechCrunch reported the news in July 2026 following an exclusive interview with founder and CEO Will Wang.

The company's founders bring unusual pedigree for a hardware startup. Wang previously led hardware engineering on Apple's Watch and iPhone lines. Two co-founders came from luxury eyewear — one from Lindberg, a Danish frame-maker known for precision optics. That combination of consumer electronics expertise and optical craftsmanship shaped the product strategy from the start.

The Hardware Bet

Even Realities launched the G1 in 2024, marketed as the lightest waveguide smart glasses available at the time — waveguide technology uses thin optical layers to project images directly into your line of sight without a bulky display. The company shipped more than 10,000 pairs in its first year. The follow-up G2, released in November 2025, took a notably different direction: no camera, a heads-up display only, and an optional companion ring called the Even R1 for input.

The absence of a camera stands out in a category where most competitors emphasize always-on video capture. By design, the G2 functions as a display-and-control device, not a camera platform. That narrower scope sidesteps both the regulatory scrutiny and user distrust that cameras in eyewear consistently provoke.

Under the hood, Even Realities developed Even HAO (Holistic Adaptive Optics) — a proprietary optical system that integrates the chip, waveguide, and prescription lens correction into one unified design. Combining waveguide displays with prescription correction has been a longstanding engineering challenge; most competing products retrofit prescription support onto display systems designed without it in mind.

Traction and Scale

The company's headcount provides a clear growth signal: 30–40 employees in 2024, 300–400 by mid-2026. That ten-fold expansion in 18 months tracks a company that found product-market fit and is now scaling manufacturing, distribution, and software capabilities in parallel.

Geography matters here. More than half of Even Realities' user base is in the United States, which the company reports as its fastest-growing market. For a Chinese-founded, Chinese-backed hardware company to build a US-majority customer base in the smart eyewear space — a category linked to always-on wearables — signals that the product has overcome significant market perception barriers that typically slow Chinese hardware adoption in America.

The Meituan and Tencent backing brings leverage beyond capital alone. Meituan controls logistics and delivery networks across China; Tencent runs one of the world's largest digital platforms and payment systems. Both offer distribution advantages in China, though whether either investor's influence extends meaningfully to US or European channels remains unclear.

What does this valuation mean for the broader smart glasses market? The speed matters more than the absolute figure. Even Realities was founded in 2023, shipped its first product in 2024, and reached unicorn status before its third birthday. The consumer AR space littered with expensive startups that never made the jump from prototype to meaningful adoption — Google Glass being the most famous case. Even Realities has already shipped units at scale and built a paying customer base, a milestone most predecessors never reached.

The camera-free G2 strategy deserves close attention. It reflects a deliberate choice to compete on how well glasses feel to wear day-to-day rather than on feature quantity. The underlying hypothesis: the first durable smart glasses winner will be the device people actually keep on their faces, not the one with the longest spec sheet. Whether that narrower product focus creates lasting competitive advantage or functions as a temporary position while optical and battery technology improve will become clear in the next product generation.

The new funding will likely accelerate Even HAO development and expansion of US market infrastructure. Wang has not publicly detailed specific use of the capital beyond what was covered in the TechCrunch interview.