Chinese Smart Glasses Brand "Even Realities" Just Hit $1B in Valuation. The Man Behind It Spent a Decade Learning How Not to Build a Gadget.
- Tech Deck Magazine Staff Writer
- Jul 16
- 5 min read
Even Realities just hit a valuation of $1B. The man behind it spent a decade learning how not to build a just another gadget. But will Will Wang's innovation secure credibility in the smart glasses space?
Smart glasses have been trying to happen (efficiently) for over a decade. Google Glass came and went. Apple Vision Pro proved that a face-computer is still a computer, bulky and impossible to wear past an afternoon. And Meta Glasses made cameras-on-your-face feel normal through its Ray-Ban partnership (at least for the TikTok crowd). What none of them have been able to win at is creating a pair of glasses non-techie corporate professionals would actually wear all day, without feeling like a walking ad for surveillance tech.
Enter the claims and positioning of Even Realities, a recent startup based in Shenzhen, a major tech manufacturing hub in Guangdong Province, China, that recently raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round. The round was led by Meituan (a Beijing-based Chinese tech giant best known for food delivery and local services) and Tencent (a Shenzhen-based tech conglomerate that owns WeChat and one of the world’s largest gaming businesses). The raise pushed Even Realities’ valuation to $1 billion. The round brings the company’s total disclosed funding to $159 million. If the name is new to you, it won’t be for long, because while the rest of the industry keeps racing to put cameras on your face, Even Realities is betting the winning move is putting information in your line of sight instead; with no lens pointed outward at anyone.
A BUILDER WITH RECEIPTS
The founder is Will Wang, and his resume is the reason investors took this seriously before the product even proved itself. Wang started his career as an industrial engineer at Procter & Gamble. He then spent two years at Apple, from 2016 to 2018, working on the Apple Watch and iPhone. From there he moved through product management roles at Anker (a Chinese consumer electronics company known for phone chargers and portable power) and OPPO (a Chinese smartphone maker based in Guangdong) before landing at JMGO, a Shenzhen-based smart projector company, where he rose to Chief Product Officer. In September 2023, he left to found Even Realities, and he brought a chunk of his JMGO team with him.
Wang's projector background is not a footnote. It’s the entire reason the product exists in its current form. Smart glasses live and die on optical display technology, the same miniaturized waveguide and micro-projection systems Wang spent years refining for home theater. Building a projector that fits inside a pair of glasses is a different problem than building one that sits on a shelf, but the underlying discipline, optical engineering, supply chain management, component miniaturization, is the same. Wang has been explicit that this carryover is what enabled Even Realities to move fast on a hard problem most competitors are still approaching from scratch.
He wanted to build a pair of glasses that happens to have tech in it.
Will Wang's stated philosophy is a direct jab at how he sees most of the industry operating. He’s described the common approach among Chinese tech companies as competition-driven: find something that sells, (like the iPhone), and create a cheaper or more feature-packed version of it. Wang says he built Even Realities to avoid that trap entirely. His framing, repeated in interviews, is that most companies are trying to build a tech product that looks like glasses. He wanted to build a pair of glasses that happens to have tech in it. That distinction shows up everywhere in the product decisions: no camera, a design language borrowed from luxury eyewear rather than consumer electronics, and a founding team stacked with people from Samsung (South Korean, based in Suwon), Philips (Dutch, based in Amsterdam), and high-end frame houses Mykita (a Berlin-based eyewear designer) and Lindberg (a Danish luxury eyewear brand), not just engineers. Wang has said plainly that if people are going to wear something on their face for eight to ten hours a day, it has to work as glasses first and a computer second. That single design constraint is arguably the whole company strategy.
The Product: Display, Not Capture
The flagship Even G2 has no outward-facing camera at all, so it cannot record video, take photos, or capture anything the wearer looks at. Instead, it uses a binocular monochrome green "heads-up" display, a tiny waveguide projector built into the lenses that beams text and graphics onto the inside of the glass, visible only to the wearer. That same display is what powers the Teleprompt feature described below: it’s a private screen, not a camera. Navigation is handled by the Even R1, a companion smart ring, which keeps the frame itself free of buttons.
The company calls its optical approach Holistic Adaptive Optics, developed with an ophthalmology team led by Dr. Qu Jia, former president of Wenzhou Medical University in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, focused on making sure a display sitting inches from your eyes for most of the day doesn’t quietly wreck your vision over time.
The Bet Against Meta
The numbers explain why Tencent and Meituan wrote the check. The smart glasses category grew 167% year-over-year, and Meta still commands roughly 70% of the market through its Ray-Ban partnership with EssilorLuxottica (a French-Italian eyewear conglomerate, headquartered across Paris and Milan, that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley). That dominance is also Even’s opening. Meta’s glasses are built around content capture and social distribution, which is a hard sell in a boardroom, a client meeting, or anywhere confidentiality matters. Even Realities is explicitly not chasing that user. It’s chasing the professional who wants context, not content.
Even Realities is not the only company chasing that gap. Domestic rival Rokid (a Hangzhou, China-based AR glasses maker) is valued higher, at roughly $2.58 billion, and RayNeo (a Chinese AR eyewear brand backed by TCL), XREAL (a Beijing-based AR glasses company), and Viture (an AR glasses company with operations in the U.S. and China) are all raising serious capital in the same window. Even Realities isn’t the biggest name in Chinese smart eyewear, but it’s the one that just convinced two of the country’s largest tech conglomerates to bet on the idea that the next computing interface should be quiet, private, and barely there at all.
Whether that thesis holds beyond early adopters and TEDx speakers is the real open question, and it’s one Wang seems aware of. His stated goal for the product isn’t more features. It’s earning attention rather than demanding it. For a founder who spent a decade learning what not to build before he built this, that restraint looks less like a marketing line and more like the actual strategy.
A note about what you’re actually buying: the G2 glasses and the R1 ring are two separate pieces of hardware sold separately, not a single bundled unit. The glasses alone run $599. The ring is an additional $249 and only functions when paired with the G2, it has no standalone use. Even Realities has occasionally offered limited-time bundle discounts on the ring, but the default purchase is glasses first, ring optional. The glasses do work on their own, but with typical physical touch to frame requirements.
On the software side, three features do most of the work. Conversate transcribes conversations in real time and turns them into an AI-generated summary with action points afterward, useful in meetings, interviews, or one-on-ones where you’d rather not be scribbling notes. Translate puts live translated text into your field of vision across roughly three dozen languages; the USA Deaf Swimming Team has used it to follow real-time communication during international competitions. Teleprompt scrolls a script at a pace that can auto-adjust to your speaking rhythm, aimed squarely at anyone who presents, pitches, or preaches for a living.
*This article is for editorial purposes only and does not constitute a product endorsement.
