South Korean company LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

Imagine you are riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour when an arrow appears floating on the road in front of you, telling you exactly where to go. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet and a thumbnail sized lens.

This is not a concept video. It’s headed to European roads early this year. This is an early glimpse of where smart glasses are headed.

Over the past few years, big tech companies have been quietly (and not very quietly) placing their bets. Meta has been selling Ray-Ban’s AI glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, it was reported that Samsung is set to unveil its first AI smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at the Galaxy Unpacked event in London next July. Chinese companies Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are also moving.

The numbers reflect momentum. Global shipments of AI glasses rose to 8.7 million units in 2025, an increase of more than 300% from the previous year, and analysts expect that number to exceed 15 million this year, according to Omdia.

Suppliers and makers of AI-powered smart eyeglasses components are also preparing for what comes next. One company, a South Korean startup called LetinAR, has spent the past decade building the optical technology that could make all of this truly wearable.

The LG Electronics-backed startup has just secured $18.5 million from the Korea Development Bank and the investment arm of the South Korean retail giant, Lotte Ventures, among others, ahead of its scheduled 2027 IPO in South Korea.

Its previous investor, LG Electronics, has since begun developing its own AI-powered smart glasses, according to a local media report, a sign of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company is taking the category.

CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, founded LetinAR together in 2016.

The lens that makes it wearable

LetinAR does not make glasses. It makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the small lens component that projects images into your field of vision, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses looks like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It must be light, thin and energy efficient, while still providing a sharp and clear image. Getting it all right in a single component, small enough to fit into an ordinary-looking tire, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. This is what LetinAR builds.

“We see AI glasses as the next platform,” Kim said. “The optical module is the hardest part to get right, as makers of AI glasses will need a lens that is thinner, lighter and more energy efficient than what exists today.”

LetineAR wants to be the company that eyeglass makers call it, the founders said. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a method of arranging small optical elements inside the lens so that light is directed precisely where it should go to the user’s eye, rather than scattering it in every direction.

Think of a television. It emits light across the entire room, but only the light that reaches your eyes is important. Most current smart lens technology, especially a mainstream approach called waveguide, works a bit like this TV, splitting the light and spreading it across the entire lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin, but ineffective lens. Ha explained that a lot of light is eliminated before it reaches the eye, which means blurry images and, more importantly, a quickly draining battery.

The alternative, a mirror-based approach known as a birdbath, delivers light directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside something resembling a regular pair of glasses.

PinTILT avoids this trade-off, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully engineering the angle of each small element within the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor, using less power. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life matters, this is the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.

There are a number of peers in this space such as WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.

Clients

Its units are already shipped. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly Toshiba Client Solutions, among its clients, giving the company real-world manufacturing experience at scale. It is in talks with major tech companies about research and development for the next generation of AI glasses, although it declined to name them.

One of LetinAR’s most demanding clients is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deep-tech company that spun out of ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety alerts directly in the biker’s field of vision, not perched on the visor, but superimposed on the road itself, as if the information were physically mapped onto the world ahead.

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

The latest funding, which brings the total amount raised to $41.7 million, will move toward expansion as the AI ​​glasses market transitions from early adopters to mass production, Kim said, adding that devices, such as AI glasses, are the next layer that will bring AI into everyday life.