LetinAR and the Optical Revolution of AI Glasses: A Future in Sight

Imagine yourself riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour when suddenly an arrow appears, floating on the road in front of you, indicating where to turn. No need for a phone or dashboard. Just your helmet and a tiny lens. This is not a futuristic vision, but a reality unfolding on European roads starting this year. It’s a glimpse into the direction smart glasses are taking.

In recent years, major tech companies have quietly, and sometimes more visibly, bet on this market. Meta has been marketing Ray-Ban glasses with artificial intelligence since 2023, Google is working on Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market. Samsung was set to unveil its first AI-compatible smart glasses, designed in collaboration with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. Chinese companies such as Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and others are also making strides.

The numbers illustrate this momentum. Global shipments of AI glasses reached 8.7 million units in 2025, marking an increase of over 300% compared to the previous year, and analysts predict that this figure will exceed 15 million this year, according to Omdia.

Suppliers and manufacturers of components for AI-powered smart glasses are also positioning themselves for what comes next. One of these companies, a South Korean startup named LetinAR, has spent the last decade developing optical technology that could make these devices truly wearable.

The startup, backed by LG Electronics, has just secured $18.5 million in funding from the Korea Development Bank and the venture capital arm of the South Korean giant, Lotte Ventures, among others, ahead of its planned IPO in 2027 in South Korea.

Its previous investor, LG Electronics, has since begun developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a report from local media, highlighting the importance that South Korea's largest consumer electronics company places on this category.

LetinAR's CEO, Jaehyeok Kim, and CTO Jeonghun Ha, friends since high school, founded the company together in 2016.

The Lens That Makes Glasses Wearable

LetinAR does not manufacture the glasses. It creates the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the small lens component that projects images into your field of vision, determines whether a pair of smart glasses looks like a sci-fi headset or something you would actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It needs to be lightweight, thin, and energy-efficient while providing a sharp and clear image. Successfully combining all of this into a single component, small enough to fit into a frame that looks normal, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. This is what LetinAR is building.

“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “And the optical module is the hardest part to achieve, as AI glasses manufacturers will need a lens that is thinner, lighter, and more energy-efficient than what exists today.”

The co-founders stated that LetinAR wants to be the company that these glasses manufacturers call. The company refers to its technology as PinTILT: a way to organize small optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go, into the user's eye, rather than scattered in all directions.

Think of a television. It broadcasts light throughout a room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly a dominant approach called waveguide, work a bit like that television, splitting and spreading light across the entire lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens, but inefficient. Much light is lost before reaching the eye, resulting in dimmer images and, critically, a battery that drains quickly, Ha explained.

The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as birdbath, delivers light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to integrate into something that resembles a normal pair of glasses.

PinTILT avoids this compromise, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of each small element inside the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner and lighter format while using less energy. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life counts, this is the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.

In this field, there are several peers like WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.

Its modules are already being shipped. LetinAR counts among its clients NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, giving the company real large-scale manufacturing experience. It is in talks with Big Tech companies about R&D for next-generation AI glasses, although it declined to name them.

One of LetinAR's most demanding clients is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deep tech company spun out of the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed, and safety alerts directly in a motorcyclist's field of vision, not floating on the visor but anchored to the road itself, as if the information were physically painted on the world in front.

LetinAR's module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.

The latest funding, which brings the total raised to $41.7 million, will be used for expansion as the AI glasses market shifts from early adopters to mass production, Kim said, adding that hardware devices, such as AI glasses, are the next layer that will integrate AI into everyday life.