South Korea’s LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 100 miles per hour and an arrow appears, floating on the road in front of you, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet and a lens the size of a thumbnail.

This is not a concept video. It will hit European roads this year. And it’s the first glimpse of where smart glasses are going.

In recent years, Big Tech has quietly (and not so quietly) placed its bets. Meta sells AI-enabled products Ray-Ban glasses since 2023Google does Building Android XRAnd Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week Samsung was reportedly will unveil its first AI-enabled smart glasses, designed in collaboration with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London in July. Chinas Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are all moving too.

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

Suppliers and component makers of AI-powered smartglasses are also positioning themselves for what comes next. One of the companies called a South Korean startup LetinARhas spent the past decade building the optical technology that could make all of this actually wearable.

The LG Electronics-backed startup just secured $18.5 million from the likes of Korea Development Bank and South Korean retail giant Lotte Ventures, ahead of its planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.

His previous investor, LG electronicshas since started developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report, which is a sign of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company is taking this category.

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

The lens that makes it portable

LetinAR does not make the glasses. It makes the glasses work. The optical module, the small lens part that projects images into your field of view, determines whether smart glasses feel like a sci-fi headset or like something you would actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It must be light, thin and energy efficient while still providing a sharp, clear image. Getting all that right in a single part, small enough to fit into a normal-looking frame, is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. That’s what LetinAR is building.

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

The co-founders said LetineAR wants to be the company that eyewear makers call it. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way of placing small optical elements in a lens so that light ends up exactly where it needs to go: in the user’s eye, instead of being scattered in all directions.

Think of a television. It emits light throughout the room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies are mainly referred to as a dominant approach waveguidework a bit like that TV, splitting and spreading the light across the entire lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens, but an inefficient lens. A lot of light is thrown away before it ever reaches the eye, which means weaker images and, crucially, a battery that drains quickly, Ha explained.

The alternative, a mirror-based approach, known as birdbathdelivers light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it almost impossible to fit into anything that resembles normal glasses.

PinTILT sidesteps that tradeoff, Ha said. By focusing only on the light that can actually enter the eye and carefully controlling the angle of every tiny element in the lens, LetinAR claims it can produce a brighter image in a thinner, lighter form factor, with less power consumption. In a category where every gram and hour of battery life matters, that’s the problem the entire industry is trying to solve.

In the space there are a number of colleagues such as WaveOptics, DigiLens and Lumus.

Customers

The modules have already been shipped. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its customers, giving the company true large-scale manufacturing experience. It is in talks with Big Tech companies about R&D of next-generation AI glasses, although it declined to name them.

This is one of LetinAR’s most demanding customers Aegis Ridera Swiss deep-tech company, which emerged from ETH Zurich’s Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AI-powered AR helmet that displays navigation, speed and safety alerts directly in a motorcyclist’s field of view, not floating on the visor, but anchored to the road itself, as if the information was physically painted onto the world in front of us.

The LetinAR module is located in the helmet. Aegis Rider will focus on the European and Swiss markets in 2026.

The latest funding, which brings the total to $41.7 million, will move toward scale 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 bring AI into everyday life.