The Singapore startup learned that putting AI in your sightline is easy to demo and hard to live with. Halo is its third attempt - thinner, longer-lasting, more private, and open enough for developers to make the glasses useful in ways the company has not imagined.
A 13-person Miami outfit is selling AI-powered smart glasses for a fraction of Ray-Ban Meta's price - by leaving out the one feature everyone else brags about.
Snapchat made disappearing photos feel natural. Now Snap is using that private, camera-first habit - plus ads, subscriptions and an army of Lens creators - to finance a much stranger bet on what comes after the phone.
Datost is a Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26) startup founded by Maceo Cardinale Kwik and Jason Wang. It launched as 'the proactive AI data analyst' - a Slack-native agent with a semantic layer that scored 75.2% on the BIRD-Interact text-to-SQL benchmark versus 33% for a frontier model alone - and has since become an applied research lab building ED1TH, a 25-gram pair of AI AR smart glasses with no cameras, an in-lens display, and a companion smart ring. Backed by Y Combinator and OpenAI.