Smart glasses maker Even Realities has joined the tech unicorn ranks after securing $150 million in fresh funding, pushing its valuation to $1 billion and underscoring investor confidence in a display-first vision for wearable computing.

The pre-Series B round was led by Chinese food delivery and local services giant Meituan, with participation from existing backer Tencent and other prominent investors, including Sequoia China. The capital injection positions the Shenzhen-headquartered startup as one of the most closely watched challengers to Big Tech players racing to define the future of smart eyewear.

Founded by former Apple engineers, Even Realities set out to rethink smart glasses not as face-mounted cameras, but as discreet information displays. Chief executive Will Wang, who previously worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone, and co-founders with backgrounds in both consumer tech and luxury eyewear, focused on comfort, optics and privacy from day one.

The company’s first product, the Even G1, was introduced as an ultra-light waveguide-based pair of smart glasses and quickly exceeded internal expectations, selling more than 10,000 units and helping the team scale from a few dozen employees to several hundred.

Its current flagship, the Even G2, abandons the camera altogether. Instead, a heads-up display embedded in the lenses projects notifications, translations and contextual information into the wearer’s field of view. Control comes via the Even R1, a companion ring that users tap and swipe to navigate, keeping interactions subtle and hands-free.

That camera-free design is central to the company’s privacy pitch. Even Realities argues that smart glasses will be the most intimate computing device many people ever use, and that social acceptance depends on not making bystanders feel surveilled. Voice-based features are designed to transcribe rather than store audio, user data is encrypted, and the firm says its infrastructure is built to comply with stringent European privacy rules.

Behind the scenes, Even Realities has poured resources into optics, developing a proprietary system called Holistic Adaptive Optics, or Even HAO. The approach integrates microchips, waveguides and prescription support as a single stack, rather than bolting together off-the-shelf components, in an effort to deliver brighter, sharper and more natural-looking overlays.

More than half of Even’s users are in the United States, its fastest-growing market, with additional traction in Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Europe. Despite manufacturing in China, the company has yet to launch there, saying it wants to be fully prepared before entering its home market.

Even Realities positions its frames near the top of the price range for consumer smart glasses, with hardware and accessories often bringing the total purchase close to $1,000. The company says it is already profitable, driven largely by male professionals and executives who use its Conversate copilot to parse meetings and conversations in real time.