South Korea’s LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

Think about you’re using a bike at 160 kilometers per hour when an arrow seems, floating on the street forward, telling you precisely the place to show. No cellphone, no dashboard. Simply your helmet, and a lens the scale of a thumbnail.

This isn’t an idea video. It’s heading to European roads as early as this 12 months. And it’s one early glimpse of the place good glasses are heading.

Over the previous few years, Massive Tech has been quietly (and never so quietly) putting its bets. Meta has been promoting AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is constructing Android XR, and Apple is predicted to enter the market. Final week, Samsung was reportedly set to unveil its first AI-capable good glasses, co-designed with Mild Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked occasion in London this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are all shifting too.

The numbers mirror the momentum. International AI glasses shipments surged to eight.7 million items in 2025, up greater than 300% from the prior 12 months, and analysts mission that determine will cross 15 million this 12 months, per Omdia.

Suppliers and element makers of AI-powered smartglasses are additionally positioning themselves for what comes subsequent. One of many firms, a South Korean startup referred to as LetinAR, has spent the final decade constructing the optical know-how that would make all of this really wearable.

The LG Electronics-backed startup simply secured $18.5 million from Korea Growth Financial institution and the South Korean retail big’s enterprise arm, Lotte Ventures, amongst others, forward of its deliberate 2027 IPO in South Korea.

Its earlier investor, LG Electronics, has since begun creating its personal AI good glasses, in accordance with a neighborhood media report, which is an indication of how severely South Korea’s largest client electronics firm takes the class.

CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who’ve been mates since highschool, based LetinAR collectively in 2016.

The lens that makes it wearable

LetinAR would not make the glasses. It makes the half that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the tiny lens element that initiatives photos into your sight view, is what determines whether or not a pair of good glasses appears like a sci-fi headset or one thing you’d really put on to work, Ha informed Trendster. It must be gentle, skinny, and power-efficient, whereas nonetheless delivering a pointy, clear picture. Getting all of that proper in a single element, sufficiently small to suit inside a normal-looking body, is the central engineering problem of your complete trade. That is what LetinAR is constructing.

“We see AI glasses as that subsequent platform,” Kim mentioned. “And the optical module is the toughest half to get proper as AI glasses makers will want a lens that’s thinner, lighter, and extra power-efficient than what exists in the present day.”

The co-founders mentioned LetineAR desires to be the corporate these glasses makers name. The corporate calls its know-how PinTILT: a method of arranging tiny optical parts inside a lens in order that gentle is directed exactly the place it must go, into the consumer’s eye, relatively than scattered in each path.

Consider a TV. It broadcasts gentle throughout a whole room, however solely the sunshine that really reaches your eyes issues. Most current good lens applied sciences, notably a dominant strategy referred to as waveguide, work a bit like that TV, splitting and spreading gentle throughout the total lens to create a large picture. The result’s a skinny lens, however an inefficient one. A variety of gentle will get thrown away earlier than it ever reaches the attention, which implies dimmer photos and, critically, a battery that drains quick, Ha defined.

The choice, a mirror-based strategy referred to as birdbath, delivers gentle extra on to the attention, however the construction is cumbersome, making it almost not possible to suit inside one thing that appears like a traditional pair of glasses.

PinTILT sidesteps that tradeoff, Ha mentioned. By focusing solely on the sunshine that may really enter the attention and punctiliously engineering the angle of every tiny factor contained in the lens, LetinAR claims it will probably produce a brighter picture in a thinner, lighter type issue, utilizing much less energy. In a class the place each gram and each hour of battery life issues, that is the issue your complete trade has been attempting to resolve.

Within the area, there are a selection of friends like WaveOptics, DigiLens and Lumus.

Clients

Its modules are already transport. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Units and Dynabook, previously referred to as Toshiba Shopper Options, amongst its clients, giving the corporate actual manufacturing expertise at scale. It’s in talks with Massive Tech firms on R&D of next-generation AI glasses, although it declined to call them.

Certainly one of LetinAR’s most demanding clients is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech firm spun out of ETH Zurich’s Pc Imaginative and prescient Lab. Aegis Rider is constructing an AI-powered AR helmet that shows navigation, velocity, and security alerts instantly in a bike rider’s sight view, not floating on the visor, however anchored to the street itself, as if the knowledge is bodily painted on the world forward.

LetinAR’s module is contained in the helmet. Aegis Rider is concentrating on the EU and Swiss markets in 2026.

The newest funding, which brings the whole raised to $41.7 million, will go towards scale-up because the AI glasses market shifts from early adopters to mass manufacturing, mentioned Kim, including that {hardware} units, equivalent to AI glasses, are the following layer that can carry AI into on a regular basis life.