LetinAR, a South Korean optics startup building the lens modules inside AI glasses, has raised $18.5 million from Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, lifting total funding to $41.7 million ahead of a planned 2027 IPO in Seoul. The round arrives as global AI glasses shipments hit 8.7 million units in 2025, a 300% jump from the prior year, with Omdia projecting 15 million units this year. LetinAR doesn't make the glasses — it makes the part that determines whether smart glasses are wearable at all.
The optical module is the tiny lens component that projects images into a user's field of vision. It has to be thin, light, and power-efficient while still producing a sharp image, and squeezing all three into a normal-looking frame is the central engineering problem holding the category back. LetinAR's pitch is that its PinTILT technology cracks that tradeoff.
PinTILT arranges optical elements inside a lens to direct light precisely toward the eye rather than scattering it across the lens surface. The dominant alternative, waveguide optics, spreads light across the full lens to form a wide image — thin but inefficient, with most photons thrown away before reaching the eye, draining the battery faster. A second approach, birdbath, delivers light more directly but is too bulky for a normal frame.
Key facts
- 01LetinAR raised $18.5M from Korea Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, bringing total funding to $41.7M ahead of a planned 2027 IPO in South Korea.
- 02Global AI glasses shipments reached 8.7 million units in 2025, a 300% surge from the prior year, per Omdia.
- 03Omdia projects AI glasses shipments will cross 15 million units this year.
- 04LetinAR's PinTILT optical modules are shipping in products from Japan's NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook, plus Switzerland's Aegis Rider.
- 05Aegis Rider's AR motorcycle helmet, powered by LetinAR optics, targets EU and Swiss markets in 2026 with road navigation at 160 km/h.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Jaehyeok Kim and CTO Jeonghun Ha, who have been friends since high school, LetinAR has spent roughly a decade on the optics problem before the AI glasses market matured around it. "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."
“Global AI glasses shipments hit 8.7 million units in 2025, up more than 300% year-over-year, with Omdia projecting 15 million units this year.”— Jaeden Schafer
The timing reflects how aggressively the rest of the industry is moving. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023. Google is building Android XR. Apple is expected to enter the category. Samsung was reportedly set to unveil its first AI smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are all moving as well.
LetinAR's modules are already shipping. Japan's NTT QONOQ Devices and Dynabook — formerly Toshiba Client Solutions — are customers, giving the company real volume manufacturing experience. LetinAR said it is in talks with Big Tech companies on R&D for next-generation AI glasses but declined to name them. Its previous backer, LG Electronics, has reportedly begun developing its own AI smart glasses, a signal of how seriously South Korea's largest consumer electronics company takes the category.
One of LetinAR's more demanding customers is Aegis Rider, a Swiss deeptech spun out of ETH Zurich's Computer Vision Lab. Aegis Rider is building an AR motorcycle helmet that anchors navigation arrows, speed, and safety alerts to the road itself — visible at 160 kilometers per hour — rather than floating them on the visor. LetinAR's module is inside the helmet. Aegis Rider is targeting EU and Swiss markets in 2026.
Competition in the optics layer is real. WaveOptics, DigiLens, and Lumus are all chasing the same socket inside the next wave of devices, each with a different bet on which physics wins at scale. PinTILT's advantage, per Ha, is brightness-per-milliwatt: a lens that puts more usable photons in the eye for less battery. That claim will be tested when high-volume customers ship at consumer price points.
The unknowns are familiar to anyone who watched the first wave of AR die on the vine. Display brightness in sunlight, prescription-lens compatibility, weight distribution on the bridge of the nose, and cost per unit at 10-million-plus volumes are all variables that have killed previous optics designs. LetinAR has shipping customers but no Big Tech design win it can publicly claim, and the category leader — Meta's Ray-Ban line — uses its own optical stack.
The $18.5 million round and the 2027 IPO timeline put LetinAR in position for the moment AI glasses transition from early-adopter volumes to mass market, which Omdia's 15-million-unit forecast for this year suggests is happening now. Component suppliers tend to capture durable margin when a hardware category goes vertical-to-horizontal, and the optical module is the one piece every glasses maker has to source. If PinTILT's power-efficiency claims hold up in Big Tech qualification cycles, LetinAR becomes the kind of unglamorous infrastructure bet that ends up worth more than most of the brands using it.
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