smart-glasses
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The $43 Million Shortcut: How KITS Turned Contact Lenses Into a Million-Customer Eyewear Machine
KITS bought a working contact-lens engine, gave away the first pair of glasses, and spent years teaching a low-margin retailer to manufacture loyalty. The useful lesson is not the discount - it is the machinery behind it.
Brilliant Labs Keeps Rebuilding the Same $349 Bet: AI Glasses You Can Rewrite
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.
The $99 Smart Glasses Taking On Ray-Ban Meta - Without the Camera
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.
Be My Eyes
A free app built around a tiny human favor has become a global accessibility network - and a practical blueprint for building AI with the people it is meant to serve.
AirCaps
AirCaps builds lightweight AR smart glasses that display real-time captions, translate 60+ languages, and take AI meeting notes directly in your field of view. Founded by Yale and Cornell computer scientists who have been building on smart glasses since age 13, the company started with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community and expanded to travelers, language learners, and professionals. The 49-gram glasses run a 4-microphone beamforming array, claim 97% caption accuracy at roughly 300ms latency, and sell for $599 with a free-forever tier.
Tesseract
Tesseract (Jio Tesseract) is an MIT Media Lab spin-off and Jio Platforms/Reliance Industries subsidiary building India's mixed reality stack: consumer devices like the JioDive VR headset (Rs 1,299), JioGlass smart glasses, and JioFrames AI glasses, plus enterprise XR platforms for training and remote assistance. Founded in 2015 by Kshitij Marwah, acquired 92.7% by Reliance in May 2019, it calls itself India's biggest XR and AI company, reaching 50+ million consumers and 50+ enterprise clients.
Xander
Xander builds XanderGlasses, standalone augmented-reality smart glasses that turn spoken conversation into real-time captions displayed in the wearer's field of view. Aimed at people with hearing loss who don't sign, the device runs speech-to-text offline - no phone, Wi-Fi, or cloud required - so private conversations stay private. An MIT Media Lab spinout founded by Alex and Marilyn Morgan Westner, Xander has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is built on customized Vuzix Shield hardware.
Mentra
Mentra is a San Francisco startup building MentraOS, an open-source operating system and app store for smart glasses, alongside Mentra Live, a 43-gram AI camera-glasses device. Founded in 2024 by MIT-dropout Cayden Pierce and Alex Israelov after they collaborated on the OpenSourceSmartGlasses project, Mentra wants to be the Android of smart glasses - a neutral software layer that lets developers ship apps and lets people actually use the hardware in the real world.
VITURE
VITURE builds XR glasses that look like sunglasses and act like a giant private screen. Plug them into a phone, console, Steam Deck, or laptop and a 150-plus-inch virtual display floats in front of you, with electrochromic tint, sharp micro-OLED panels, HARMAN audio, and AI-powered 2D-to-3D conversion. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google Glass engineer David Jiang, the company has become the leading name in the U.S. display-glasses market and has raised over $120M to expand from gamers into enterprise and productivity.
STRIVR
STRIVR is a Santa Clara workforce-performance company that began by putting Stanford quarterbacks in virtual reality and now puts AI on the factory floor. After pioneering enterprise VR training for Fortune 1000 giants like Walmart, Verizon and Bank of America, STRIVR has shifted from preparing people for work to guiding them inside the flow of work - building hands-free, smart-glasses AI that detects and corrects operational mistakes in real time and turns expert know-how into instant visual instructions.
Meta
Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.