Smart Glasses Maker Even Realities Hits $1B Valuation With $150M Round Led by Meituan and Tencent

Even Realities, the three-year-old Shenzhen smart glasses startup founded by former Apple engineers, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan with participation from existing backer Tencent, valuing the company at $1 billion.

Betting against the camera

While Meta and a wave of imitators build camera-equipped glasses around content capture, Even Realities is going the other way: display-first frames that beam navigation, translation and AI-assistant output directly into the wearer's line of sight — with no camera at all. Founder and CEO Will Wang, who worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone, argues privacy is a feature the category has been ignoring.

The design-led approach extends to the team — two co-founders came from luxury eyewear, including Danish brand Lindberg — and to the price point: frames retail at $599, with average orders reaching roughly $1,000 once prescription lenses or the companion R1 ring are included.

Early traction

Even launched its first product in 2024 and became the first in its category to sell more than 10,000 pairs. The new capital will fund its next-generation platform, deeper AI integration and global expansion.

The Meituan angle

Meituan leading the round is the notable detail. The delivery and local-services giant has been expanding aggressively into AI hardware and robotics investments, and glasses that surface contextual information hands-free map naturally onto its courier fleet and local commerce ecosystem.

The round also confirms a pattern running through China's startup landscape this summer: platform giants — Ant into home robots, Meituan and Tencent into wearables, Geely across the embodied-AI stack — are underwriting the hardware layer of the AI era, betting that whoever owns the device owns the next interface to their services.