XR Glasses Maker VITURE Secures $100M Investment as Wearable Segment Heats Up

The joys of venture capital. So far the only smartglasses that we know are selling well are the Meta Ray-Bans, and we don't even know if these sell mainly because of Meta's AI driven smart features, or simply because people are used to paying hundreds of dollars/Euros for Ray-Bans even without any smart technology inside.

There have been a number of display glasses using bird bath optics, resembling regular glasses only from the front like the Rokid Max that are popular in niches, for example as external 1080p displays for Steam Decks. There are also very glasses looking devices like the Even Realities G1 that found a niche as wearable teleprompters. What we haven't seen yet is a broad use of the smart features of smartglasses by the general population. But this is what everybody is betting on, throwing hundreds of millions on startups they hope will come up with the next iPhone that will be used by billions of people after only a few years.

One thing to keep in mind is how venture capital works. A general rule is that out of ten investments, seven bomb, two become "zombies" (making enough money to survive, but not offering huge returns) and one makes enough money to pay for the other nine, usually by selling the startup to a larger company for a lot of money. And this is often driven by hype. We saw a second (third?) wave of XR investments after AVP was announced, which probably paid for the development of Play for Dream and others.

We are still mid-AI hype with Nvidia now being the most valuable company, with most of their very expensive data center AI accelerators bough by just two companies (probably Meta and OpenAI or xAI), with valuations based completely on speculation, not on actual earnings made through productivity gains from AI. From the outside all this investment looks like there must be huge business opportunities here, because otherwise nobody would throw money at it, or would they?

But XR/VR/AR itself might serve as an example that this isn't always the case, with Meta by now having invested around USD 70B with MRL alone, and more when including all acquisitions. And so far they gathered ~10M active Quest users, with most new users now only using free apps. And even having these 10M doesn't seem to provide any advantage for conquering the newest hot XR battle field, smartglasses.