Meta and Snap both shipped camera-first smart glasses last month. Even Realities just raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation to build the opposite.

The Shenzhen startup, founded by ex-Apple engineers in 2023, has no camera on its flagship G2. No livestreaming. No POV capture. Instead: a waveguide display beaming information directly into the wearer's line of sight, controlled by a ring you tap and swipe like a trackpad. Meituan and Tencent led the round. Sequoia China backed the earlier ones. The money arrived faster than the company expected — headcount ballooned from 40 to 400 in a year.

CEO Will Wang worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone. Two co-founders came from Lindberg, the Danish luxury eyewear house. That pedigree shows. The G1 launched in 2024 as the lightest waveguide glasses on market; Even blew past its 10,000-unit target to become the first company in the category to hit five-figure sales. The G2 arrived last November. It weighs barely more than regular frames.

Wang's thesis: smart glasses are the most personal computing device humans will ever wear. Worn all day, they must feel comfortable to the wearer and the people around them. A camera on your face makes everyone else uneasy. Even's answer is to remove it entirely.

Privacy isn't a marketing bullet point here. Voice features transcribe audio to text — no recordings stored. User data is encrypted. Infrastructure meets EU standards. The company's flagship software, Conversate, reads conversations in real time, explains jargon, suggests follow-ups, then syncs a summary to your phone. Nothing leaves the device unless you allow it.

Skeptics will ask: without a camera, what's the use case? Wang's reply is blunt. The camera is a distraction. The hard problem — the only problem that matters — is optics.

"With a phone or a watch, the display is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen," Wang told TechCrunch. "Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide together. That's where we've invested the most."

That investment produced Even HAO, the company's proprietary optical technology. Waveguide displays are notoriously difficult: brightness, field of view, eye-glow, color uniformity, all-day battery life — each variable fights the others. Meta's Orion prototype solves some with silicon carbide and a separate compute puck. Snap's Spectacles 5 tether to a phone. Even's G2 runs standalone, powered by a custom chip driving a micro-LED through HAO waveguides, all inside frames that look like glasses.

The ring controller, Even R1, is the unsung hero. Voice control fails in noise. Touchpads on frames are awkward. A ring on your finger? Natural. Discrete. Always there. Even turned the input problem into a form-factor advantage.

Meituan's participation signals something beyond hardware. China's super-app giant sees a display layer for its services — navigation, ordering, payments — floating in the user's vision without pulling a phone. Tencent sees WeChat notifications, translation, social context. Both want a platform that isn't Meta's or Apple's. Even gives them a horse in the race.

The valuation is aggressive for a three-year-old hardware company with one shipping product and a second just months old. Hardware scales poorly. Supply chains break. Optical yields are brutal. But Even has already proven it can manufacture and sell. Ten thousand units at roughly $600 each is $60 million in revenue — real money for a pre-Series B startup. The $150 million buys runway to solve the next optical generation and build the software layer that makes the hardware indispensable.

Wang's bet: the winners in face-worn computing won't be the companies with the best AI assistants or the most cameras. They'll be the ones who crack the physics of light. Everything else is software. Software updates. Optics don't.

Meta has billions and a decade of research. Apple has Vision Pro and a supply chain that moves mountains. Even has 400 people, a proprietary waveguide, and a conviction that privacy and optics are the same problem. The race isn't fair. It never is. But the startup just proved it can run.