South Korea’s LetinAR develops optics for AI glasses

Imagine riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour, and a floating arrow appears directly on the road ahead, guiding your next turn. There is no phone, no dashboard , just your helmet and a lens no larger than a thumbnail.

This is not a futuristic concept. It is set to arrive on European roads as early as this year, offering a glimpse of where smart glasses are heading.

Over the past several years, major technology companies have placed their bets, both quietly and loudly. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023. Google is building Android XR, and Apple is expected to join the race. Last week, reports indicated that Samsung would unveil its first AI-capable smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. Meanwhile, China’s Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are all advancing their own efforts.

The market data confirms the momentum. Global AI glasses shipments surged to 8.7 million units in 2025, a more than 300% increase from the prior year. Analysts at Omdia project that figure will exceed 15 million units this year.

Suppliers and component manufacturers of AI-powered smart glasses are also positioning for the next wave. One such company, a South Korean startup named LetinAR, has spent the past decade developing the optical technology that could make these devices truly wearable.

Backed by LG Electronics, the startup recently secured $18.5 million from investors including Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, the venture arm of the South Korean retail giant. The funding comes ahead of its planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.

Interestingly, LG Electronics , a previous investor , has since begun developing its own AI smart glasses, according to a local media report. This signals just how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company views the category.

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

The lens that makes it wearable

LetinAR does not manufacture the glasses themselves. Instead, it produces the critical component that makes them function: the optical module. This tiny lens component projects images into the user’s field of vision. It determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a bulky sci-fi headset or something you would actually wear to the office, Ha told TechCrunch. The module must be light, thin, and power-efficient while delivering a sharp, clear image. Achieving all of this in a component small enough to fit inside a normal-looking frame is the central engineering challenge of the entire industry. That is precisely what LetinAR is building.

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

The co-founders explained that LetinAR aims to be the company those glasses makers call. Their technology is called PinTILT. It arranges tiny optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go , into the user’s eye , rather than scattering in every direction.

Consider a television. It broadcasts light across an entire room, but only the light that reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly the dominant waveguide approach, work similarly. They split and spread light across the full lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens, but an inefficient one. A significant amount of light gets wasted before it ever reaches the eye, leading to dimmer images and, critically, faster battery drain, Ha explained.

The alternative, a mirror-based method known as birdbath, delivers light more directly to the eye. However, the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside something that looks like a normal pair of glasses.

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

Competitors in this space include WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus.

Customers

LetinAR’s modules are already shipping. The company counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook , formerly Toshiba Client Solutions , among its customers, giving it real manufacturing experience at scale. It is also in discussions with Big Tech companies about R&D for next-generation AI glasses, though it declined to name them.

One of LetinAR’s most demanding customers is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech company 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 a motorcycle rider’s field of vision. The information is not floating on the visor; it is anchored to the road itself, as if physically painted on the world ahead.

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

The latest funding, which brings LetinAR’s total raised to $41.7 million, will go toward scaling up as the AI glasses market shifts from early adopters to mass production, Kim said. He added that hardware devices, such as AI glasses, represent the next layer that will bring AI into everyday life.