Ex-Apple Engineer's Even Realities Hits $1 Billion Valuation in Meituan, Tencent-Backed Round

A Shenzhen-based startup founded by a former Apple engineer has quietly built a billion-dollar business by stripping away the cameras and speakers that define most smart glasses, betting instead that a lightweight, display-first design is the key to making people actually wear the technology every day.

Even Realities Technology announced Monday it has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B funding round, catapulting its valuation to $1 billion and making it the latest unicorn in the fiercely competitive smart eyewear market. The round was led by Meituan's DragonBall Capital and Meituan's strategic investment arm, with Tencent and other existing backers participating on a pro-rata basis.

The company, founded in late 2023 by Will Wang — who spent two years at Apple working on the Apple Watch and iPhone — has taken a deliberately contrarian path. While rivals including Meta Platforms (META) and Snap (SNAP) pack their glasses with cameras, speakers, and dozens of apps, Even Realities' flagship G2 model does none of that. It projects a monochrome green heads-up display into the wearer's line of sight, controlled by a companion smart ring, and focuses relentlessly on what Wang calls the "first principle" of the category: the display itself.

"The future isn't about pulling out a device every time you need information," Wang said in a statement. "It's about having the right information available exactly when you need it, while remaining fully present in the world around you."

That philosophy appears to be resonating with a specific, high-value audience. The G2 retails for $599 for the frames alone, with the Even R1 smart ring adding $249 and prescription lens customization pushing the total package to roughly $1,000 per user — far above the $400 to $450 range typical of competing devices. Despite the premium pricing, Wang told Chinese media outlet Touzhong Wang that the company has sold "hundreds of thousands" of units, with weekly active user rates exceeding 90 percent and daily active rates reaching 60 to 70 percent.

More than half of Even Realities' user base is located in the U.S., and approximately 80 percent of its developer community is based there, according to the company. Its primary markets also include Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. Notably, the startup does not yet sell in China, though it manufactures its products across several factories in the country.

A Different Kind of Smart Glasses Company

The company's origin story begins not with a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, but with Wang's personal frustration as a heavy glasses wearer. With 600-degree myopia and a collection of high-end eyewear he began accumulating in high school, Wang understood early that a smart glasses product would fail if it could not first succeed as a comfortable, everyday pair of glasses.

"Our glasses have to be a good pair of glasses first — that's the most basic requirement," Wang told Touzhong Wang. "Even if it's not charged, I should still want to wear it, because it's comfortable and it corrects my vision."

To that end, Even Realities recruited talent from Danish luxury brand LINDBERG and German eyewear maker ic! berlin, alongside hardware engineers from Apple and Samsung. The G2 features titanium temples, a magnesium alloy frame, and weight distribution engineering more typical of high-end optical frames than consumer electronics. With prescription lenses for 600-degree myopia installed, the total weight still comes in at around 40 grams.

This obsession with wearability required painful trade-offs. The G2 has no camera, no speaker, no color display, and no app store packed with AI gimmicks. Wang argues these omissions are not limitations but deliberate design choices rooted in privacy and social acceptability. Removing the camera addresses what he sees as a fundamental tension in face-worn devices: the discomfort not just of the wearer, but of everyone around them.

Voice features like real-time translation transcribe audio into text rather than storing recordings. User data is encrypted, and the company's infrastructure is designed to meet Europe's strict General Data Protection Regulation standards, Wang told TechCrunch.

The Working Professional's Tool

The stripped-down feature set has attracted a specific demographic: male professionals aged 30 to 50, many of whom are C-suite executives, investors, salespeople, and entrepreneurs. About one-third of users are company executives, according to an internal survey cited by Wang.

Usage patterns reinforce this professional positioning. Even Realities' backend data shows that users typically wear the G2 on workdays and leave it aside on weekends — the opposite of a recreational gadget. Core use cases include real-time translation during face-to-face meetings with foreign clients, teleprompter functionality during presentations, and an AI-powered feature called Conversate that listens to conversations in real time, explains unfamiliar jargon, and syncs summaries to the user's phone.

An application store built into the G2 ecosystem already hosts hundreds of user-developed apps, ranging from Notion integrations to Claude Code tools, all adapted by the community for the glasses' minimalist display.

Market Context and Competition

The global smart glasses market is accelerating rapidly. According to research firm IDC, worldwide shipments surged 167 percent year-over-year in the first quarter, reaching 2.25 million units. Meta led the category with nearly 70 percent market share, driven by its Ray-Ban partnership, followed by Shenzhen RayNeo Technology and Xiaomi. IDC projects total shipments — including display-equipped and virtual reality glasses — will more than double to 50 million units by 2030.

Even Realities faces well-funded domestic rivals. Hangzhou-based Rokid was valued at $2.58 billion after raising $522 million in March, according to PitchBook data. RayNeo, incubated by TCL Electronics, is valued at $239.9 million.

Yet Even Realities has charted a distinct path by prioritizing profitability over market share capture. Wang told Touzhong Wang that the company has been profitable since launching its first product, the G1, in 2024, and revenue accelerated sharply after the G2's release in November 2025. The company has expanded from a team of just over 10 people at the G1 launch to nearly 300 today.

Channel Strategy and What's Next

The startup has also built an unusual distribution model. Even Realities has partnered with more than 400 high-end optical retailers across 30 countries and regions, with offline sales accounting for roughly half of total volume. This places the G2 directly alongside traditional luxury eyewear brands — a positioning that Wang believes validates the company's thesis that smart glasses must compete on optical quality and design before they compete on technology.

The fresh capital will fund development of a next-generation platform that Wang hinted could represent an "iPhone moment" for the category, as well as deeper AI integration and expanded global operations. The company's investor roster now reads like a who's who of Chinese venture capital: Sequoia China, CDH Investments, Hillhouse, Monolith Management, CVC Capital, Aier Eye Hospital, CMB International, Lightspeed China, and Northern Light Venture Capital, alongside strategic investors Meituan and Tencent.

"With a phone or a watch, the display is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen," Wang told TechCrunch. "Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack. You have to design the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide together. That's where we've invested the most."

Even Realities developed a proprietary optical system called Even HAO, or Holistic Adaptive Optics, which integrates the microchip, waveguide, and prescription support from the start rather than combining independently designed components.

As Meta, Snap, and a growing field of competitors race to add more features to face-worn devices, Even Realities is betting that less is more — and that the company that finally makes smart glasses disappear into everyday life will be the one that wins.