【AI前沿】South Korea’s LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road ahead, 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’s heading to European roads as early as this year. And it’s one early glimpse of where smart glasses are heading.Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets. Meta has been selling AI-enabledRay-Ban glasses since 2023, Google isbuilding Android XR, andApple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung wasreportedlyset to unveil its first AI-capable smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. China’sHuawei,Alibaba,Xiaomi, and others are all moving too.The numbers reflect the momentum. Global AI glasses shipments surged to 8.7 million units in 2025, up more than 300% from the prior year, and analysts project that figure will cross 15 million this year,per Omdia.Suppliers and component makers of AI-powered smart glasses are also positioning themselves for what comes next. One of the companies, a South Korean startup calledLetinAR, has spent the last decade building the optical technology that could make all of this actually wearable.The LG Electronics-backed startup just secured $18.5 million from Korea Development Bank and the South Korean retail giant’s venture arm, Lotte Ventures, among others, ahead of its planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.Its previous investor,LG Electronics, has since begun developing its own AI smart glasses, according to alocal mediareport, which is a sign of how seriously South Korea’s largest consumer electronics company takes the category.LetinAR CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, founded the company together in 2016.Image Credits:LetinARThe lens that makes it wearableLetinAR doesn’t make the glasses. It makes the part that makes the glasses work. The optical module, the tiny lens component that projects images into your field of vision, is what determines whether a pair of smart glasses feels like a sci-fi headset or something you’d actually wear to work, Ha told TechCrunch. It has to be light, thin, and power-efficient, while still delivering a sharp, clear image. Getting all of that right in a single component, small enough to fit inside 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,” 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 said LetinAR wants to be the company those glasses makers call. The company calls its technology PinTILT: a way of arranging tiny optical elements inside a lens so that light is directed precisely where it needs to go, into the user’s eye, rather than scattered in every direction.Think of a TV. It broadcasts light across an entire room, but only the light that actually reaches your eyes matters. Most existing smart lens technologies, particularly a dominant approach calledwaveguide, work a bit like that TV, splitting and spreading light across the full lens to create a wide image. The result is a thin lens, but an inefficient one. A lot of light gets thrown away before it ever reaches the eye, which means dimmer images and, critically, a battery that drains fast, Ha explained.The alternative, a mirror-based approach known asbirdbath, delivers light more directly to the eye, but the structure is bulky, making it nearly impossible to fit inside something that looks like a normal pair of glasses.PinTILT sidesteps that trade-off, 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, using less power. In a category where every gram and every hour of battery life matters, that’s the problem the entire industry has been trying to solve.In the space, there are a number of peers likeWaveOptics,DigiLens, andLumus.CustomersIts modules are already shipping. LetinAR counts Japan’s NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, formerly known as Toshiba Client Solutions, among its customers, giving the company real manufacturing experience at scale. It is in talks with Big Tech companies on R&D of next-generation AI glasses, though it declined to name them.One of LetinAR’s most demanding customers isAegis Rider, a Swiss deep tech 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, not floating on the visor but anchored to the road itself, as if the information is physically painted on the world ahead.LetinAR’s mod