Shenzhen's Even Realities Hits $1B Valuation as Meituan and Tencent Bet on Camera-Free Smart Glasses

Even Realities, the three-year-old Shenzhen startup building smart glasses that deliberately leave out the camera, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and Tencent, vaulting to a $1 billion valuation at a pivotal moment for the category.

The anti-Meta bet

Founded in 2023 by former Apple engineers — CEO Will Wang worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone, and two co-founders came from luxury eyewear houses including Lindberg — Even has taken the opposite road from Meta's Ray-Bans. Its G2 glasses are display-first: a heads-up display for navigation, translation, teleprompting and AI responses, controlled by a companion ring rather than voice or a camera.

The privacy-by-design pitch has found a real market. Even was the first in its category to sell more than 10,000 pairs, the frames retail at $599, and average order value approaches $1,000 with prescription lenses and the R1 ring. More than half of its users are in the United States — its fastest-growing market — a rare case of a Chinese consumer hardware brand winning premium Western buyers under its own name.

Why Meituan and Tencent

The lead investors say as much as the number. Tencent brings the WeChat ecosystem and its AI models; Meituan — better known for food delivery — has been aggressively investing in embodied and consumer AI hardware as it hunts for its next platform. Both are effectively buying a seat in the eyewear race before Apple's long-rumored glasses arrive and before Meta's display-equipped Ray-Bans scale.

The new capital goes toward Even's next-generation platform, deeper AI integration and global expansion.

The category's moment

Smart glasses are having their strongest year since Google Glass died: Meta's display Ray-Bans, Alibaba's Quark glasses, Xiaomi's AI frames and a wave of Shenzhen startups are all shipping. Even's wager is that the winning wearable is the one you can wear into a boardroom or a bar without anyone flinching — no LED, no lens, no recording question. A billion-dollar valuation says two of China's shrewdest platform companies think privacy might be the killer feature AI hardware has been missing.