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Rokid is a Chinese augmented reality and AI glasses company headquartered in Hangzhou, founded in July 2014 by Zhu Mingming, who uses the English name Misa Zhu. Its flagship product, Rokid Glasses, is a 49 gram frame with dual micro-LED waveguide displays and a 12 megapixel camera that sold for $549 on Kickstarter in 2025 and lists at $699 on Rokid's own store as of 2026-08-01. Omdia ranked Rokid the second-largest AI glasses vendor worldwide in 2025 by shipments, behind Meta and ahead of Xiaomi, in a market Omdia sized at 8.7 million units [1]. Rokid is one of the few vendors in the category that lets buyers choose which large language model answers them, and that openness is the company's stated difference from Meta and from the Chinese platform companies now entering the same market. The legal entity is Lingban Technology (Hangzhou), which converted to a joint-stock company in early 2026 ahead of a reported Hong Kong listing [2][3].

Founding and early years

Zhu founded a Hangzhou mobile operating system company, Mammoth Technology, in 2007. Alibaba invested in and then acquired it, and Mammoth's work fed into Alibaba's YunOS. In 2013 Alibaba put Zhu in charge of an internal unit known as M Studio, working on robotics, image recognition and in-car technology; he left the following year to start Rokid [2].

The company did not begin with glasses. Its first two products were AI voice assistant devices, Rokid Alien in 2016 and Rokid Pebble in 2017. Glasses arrived in June 2018 with Rokid Glass 1, and the business through the early 2020s was largely business-to-business: industrial and remote-maintenance headsets, including an explosion-proof model, alongside tethered consumer viewers [4][5].

DateProduct or event
July 2014Rokid founded in Hangzhou [4]
February 2016Rokid Alien, first AI voice product [4]
June 2018Rokid Glass 1, all-in-one AR glasses [4]
January 2020Rokid Glass 2, tethered monocular waveguide AR glasses [4]
November 2020X-Craft explosion-proof industrial MR glasses [4]
September 2021Rokid Air consumer AR glasses, 83 g, 43 degree field of view, about $500 [5]
October 2022Rokid Station compute puck [4]
March 2023Rokid Max cinematic AR viewer [4]
April 2024Rokid AR Spatial suite [4]
November 2024Rokid Glasses announced at 2,499 RMB, shipping targeted for Q2 2025 [6]
October 2025Rokid Glasses Kickstarter closes at $3.61 million [7]
January 2026Display-free model launched globally after CES 2026 [4][8]

Rokid says it has mass-produced eleven generations of AI and AR glasses, holds more than 300 patents, and sells in more than 100 countries [4].

Funding and ownership

IDG Capital, Yuanjing Capital and Linear Capital backed Rokid from the angel round through Series B [2]. Conversions below use approximately 7.15 RMB to the US dollar.

RoundDateAmountNotes
Series CMarch 2022$110 millionInvestors named only as "ecosystem players"; Crunchbase then put cumulative funding at $378 million; headcount about 400 [5]
StrategicOctober 2022125 million RMB (about $17 million)Yuhang State Investment, days after the Rokid Station launch [2]
Strategic2022259 million RMB (about $36 million)Dunhong Asset, Ganbei Investment, Chunxiao Digital Publishing Fund and others [2]
StrategicNovember 2023$112 millionLed by Hong Kong listed NetDragon Websoft with a $20 million stake; valuation passed $1 billion [2]
StrategicJanuary 2024About 500 million RMB (about $70 million)Coordinated by the Hefei municipal government [2]
Capital increasesJanuary 2026Not disclosedFour increases in six days lifted registered capital from 2.88 million RMB to 13.96 million RMB [3]
StrategicMarch 2026180 million RMB (about $25 million)Hong Kong listed lens maker Conant Optical subscribed for ordinary shares [3]

Cumulative totals should be treated as approximate: the registry aggregator Tianyancha counted twelve rounds worth more than 3 billion RMB (roughly $420 million) by January 2024, while a later 36Kr piece gave a lower figure [2][3]. Newer shareholders include SenseTime's venture arm SenseCapital and Apple supplier Lens Technology; The Wire China put total fresh 2026 capital at about $28 million, most of it from Conant Optical, which is consistent with the 180 million RMB subscription [24]. Nikkei Asia reported on 2026-06-05 that an affiliate of Toyota had invested, which Zhu linked to expansion in Japan [9].

After the January 2026 capital increases the founding team's combined holding fell from about 99 percent to roughly 42 percent, with Zhu at 29.68 percent, and the company re-registered as a joint-stock corporation, a legal prerequisite for listing [3]. TechNode, summarizing a South China Morning Post report, said in April 2026 that Rokid was preparing to file in Hong Kong as early as the end of that month; the company said only that it was capable of pursuing an IPO [10]. No prospectus had been published as of 2026-08-01, by which point rival XREAL had already filed [3].

Products

Rokid Glasses

Rokid Glasses were announced in November 2024 at 2,499 RMB with availability targeted for the second quarter of 2025 [6]. International sales ran through Kickstarter from late August 2025 at $549 for backers, and the campaign closed on 2025-10-10 having raised $3,613,470 from more than 5,000 backers over 45 days; Rokid called it the highest-funded XR project in Kickstarter history [7]. The company has since given a higher total, just over $4 million from roughly 5,800 backers, without explaining the gap [11].

Rokid's specification page lists a 49 gram weight, a dual-eye monochrome micro-LED display at up to 1,500 nits with a 30 degree field of view, a 12 megapixel Sony IMX681 camera (109 degree diagonal, f/2.25, 1680p video), a four-microphone array, IPX4 splash resistance, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 2 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage and a 210 mAh battery [12]. Unusually for this class, Rokid names two processors: a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 paired with an NXP RT600 low-power co-processor [12].

Engadget's Sam Rutherford, testing a pre-production unit in September 2025, found the binocular green display sharp and readable outdoors and preferred the Wayfarer-like styling to Meta's thicker Ray-Ban Display. He reported up to six hours of continuous Bluetooth music playback, noted that AI features drain the battery much faster, and flagged the absence of any livestreaming path and a charging case sold separately for $100 [13].

Display-free glasses and the Bolon partnership

On 2025-11-13 Rokid launched a camera-and-audio model with no display, co-branded with Bolon, a Chinese eyewear label now owned by EssilorLuxottica. The Bolon AI Glasses weigh 38.5 grams, use a D-shaped frame with a physical button and a right-temple touchpad, run on Snapdragon AR1, support prescription lenses, and start at 2,199 RMB with a second tier at 2,599 RMB (roughly $310 to $365) [14][15]. The tie-up gave Rokid access to optical retail; Zhu said returns through physical stores with fitting services were "almost negligible, essentially zero" [14].

Rokid took the display-free design international after CES 2026, under two names. Its global store and its January and February 2026 press releases call it Rokid Ai Glasses Style, while Rokid's own corporate milestones page, its German store and its Australian launch call it Rokid AI Glasses Neo [4][8][11][16]. Both carry the same stated 38.5 gram TR90 frame, 12 megapixel IMX681 camera, 210 mAh battery rated for 12 hours of typical use (6 hours of music, 5 hours of calls or 45 minutes of video recording) and the same AR1 Gen 1 plus RT600 pairing [16][17]. Rokid said on 2026-02-02 that the model had sold more than 15,000 units since entering full global distribution [8].

AR viewers and spatial computing

Rokid's second line is tethered display eyewear rather than assistant glasses. Rokid Max (2023) and Rokid Max 2 are birdbath micro-OLED viewers that mirror a video signal; the Max 2 weighs 75 grams and has a built-in dioptre adjustment from 0.00 to -6.00, removing the need for lens inserts for many short-sighted users [18]. In 2024 Rokid crowdfunded AR Lite, a bundle of the Max 2 with the Rokid Station 2 compute puck, which runs YodaOS-Master on a Qualcomm platform with a 5,000 mAh battery and supports multiple virtual screens up to a claimed 300 inch equivalent [18]. Rokid AR Spatial, launched in April 2024, is the successor suite and is still sold with Max 2 and Station 2 variants on the same product listing [4][25]. These viewers put Rokid in a different part of the AI glasses market from its assistant glasses, competing with XREAL, VITURE and RayNeo rather than with Meta.

Product (Rokid global store, 2026-08-01)TypePrice
Rokid GlassesDisplay AI glasses, 49 g$699, listed from $799 [12]
Rokid Ai Glasses Style / NeoDisplay-free AI glasses, 38.5 g$349; EUR 449 in Germany [16][17]
Rokid AR SpatialTethered spatial viewer, about 75 g$558 [11][25]
Rokid Max 2Tethered birdbath viewer, 75 g$429 [26]

Technology and assistants

Both AI glasses lines pair Qualcomm's AR1 Gen 1 with a second low-power chip, the NXP RT600, which Rokid's spec sheets list together as the device SOC [12][17]. The display model uses micro-LED light engines feeding waveguide combiners rather than the birdbath optics of the viewer line, which is why Counterpoint Research counts Rokid Glasses in the waveguide segment and RayNeo, VITURE and XREAL in the birdbath segment [19]. Rokid has not published which waveguide type it uses. Software runs on YodaOS, Rokid's in-house operating system, first released in an XR variant in January 2019 [4].

The distinguishing feature is model choice. Rokid's product pages advertise the glasses as "the world's first AI glasses powered by both GPT and Gemini," a vendor claim, and name GPT-5 and Gemini as the built-in assistants for international units [12]. In China the same hardware connects to Qwen, DeepSeek, Doubao and Zhipu AI [14][15]. Zhu has argued this is the one thing platform rivals cannot copy, since Alibaba's Qwen glasses cannot ship with ByteDance's model and ByteDance's glasses cannot connect to DeepSeek [3]. Other integrations include Alipay payments through Ant Group, a shopping agent built with JD.com, Google Maps and Microsoft Translator [7][14][20].

Machine translation is the headline application: Rokid claims 89 online and 6 offline languages with sub-second latency, running on its own model [12]. A teleprompter mode that scrolls prepared speech text across the display turned out to be a major driver of Chinese sales among executives and government officials, according to Rokid vice president Gary Cai [20].

Sales and market position

Omdia's estimates for 2025 put global AI glasses shipments at 8.7 million units, up 322 percent, with Meta at 85.2 percent share on 7.4 million units. Rokid and Xiaomi took second and third place globally. Omdia senior analyst Qiran Ju called Rokid "a dark horse contender in the AI glasses race" that "could effectively compete in Mainland China while also expanding globally through an open approach" [1]. Omdia's release does not publish Rokid's own percentage; CNBC put it at 3.9 percent for 2025, which would be roughly 340,000 units against Omdia's total [20].

Two rank claims are often conflated. Omdia does not say Rokid leads display-equipped AI glasses. It says display-equipped units reached 730,000 in 2025, or 8.4 percent of the category, up from 3.3 percent in 2024, and that Chinese companies "including Rokid, Alibaba, and Even Realities" together accounted for 71 percent of them [1]. Separately, Counterpoint Research reported that in the first quarter of 2026 Rokid ranked first globally in the narrower waveguide-based AR glasses segment with Rokid Glasses, ahead of Meta at 38 percent, Even Realities at 9 percent and Alibaba at 5 percent; Counterpoint's text does not give Rokid's own share [19].

Vendor-reported figures track a steep ramp. Zhu said in November 2025 that Rokid had delivered more than 200,000 display-equipped Rokid Glasses since preorders opened on 1 September, including about 50,000 overseas, against an original plan of 100,000 to 150,000 units a year [14]. He put 2025 sales above 300,000 units and set targets of more than 1 million in 2026, 2 to 3 million in 2027 and 10 million in 2028 [3][14]. In May 2026 global general manager Zoro Shao said cumulative sales had passed 500,000 units across more than 1 million users [11]. None of these figures has been independently audited, and Rokid has never published profit data [2].

International markets and retail

Rokid generates about 40 percent of revenue outside mainland China [20]. Its shipping policy lists warehouses in China, the United States and Germany, and the US store shipped to American addresses as of 2026-08-01, a change from April 2026 when CNBC reported that Rokid sold its display glasses in the United Kingdom and Canada but not the United States [20][21]. Regional pricing varies: A$1,099 in Australia after a launch offer of A$999 through 8 June 2026, EUR 699 in Germany and 109,890 yen in Japan [11][27][28]. Beyond Kickstarter the company reports a record Japanese Makuake campaign and a Taiwanese campaign that raised NT$62,267,104 from 2,454 backers in December 2025 [4], with retail placement including Selfridges in the United Kingdom and Optica 88 in Hong Kong [11].

Enterprise, museums and industrial use

Rokid has sold enterprise hardware since the X-Craft explosion-proof headset of 2020, and business customers remain a stated part of the mix alongside consumer models [4][11]. Cultural heritage is its most concentrated deployment. Zhu said in November 2024 that Rokid worked with more than 200 Chinese museums, that its share of the domestic and overseas museum AR guide market exceeded 99 percent, and that at the Hunan Provincial Museum the company collected roughly 10 million RMB a year in rental income while keeping about 30 percent of it [6]. Zhu said industrial customers were about a quarter of 2023 revenue and that industrial revenue doubled year on year, against 200 percent growth for the company overall, and Rokid announced a single 20,000-unit order in November 2023 [2]. Rokid claims more than 30,000 registered XR developers and about 5,000 enterprise partners worldwide as of mid-2026, up from the 3,000 developers it reported in November 2025, and it presents that ecosystem as a core part of its position in China's AI glasses industry [11][14].

Criticism and controversy

Demand outran manufacturing in the second half of 2025. Chinese coverage reported that orders far exceeded Rokid's production ceiling and that many buyers did not receive their glasses on time [3]. An earlier and harsher critique came in January 2024, when Rongzhong Finance reported that large numbers of Rokid AR headsets and bundles had ended up idle and were being resold on second-hand platforms at discounts of more than 1,500 RMB [2].

Rokid was also at the centre of the privacy backlash that prompted China's first industry code of conduct for AI glasses. In June 2026 videos posted in Rokid's own user community showed members of the public being filmed without their knowledge on subway trains, in parks, on beaches and in shopping malls, including a widely shared clip of a flight attendant serving passengers [22]. The company removed some videos and blocked the uploading accounts [22], and on 2026-06-08 said current products would get hardware-level recording indicators and obstruction detection [23]. The episode was compounded by a trade in cheap stickers sold to cover recording indicator lights, of which Chinese e-commerce platforms reported sales of more than 5,000 units [23]. On 2026-06-25 the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, issued a voluntary code of conduct for AI glasses calling for minimum data collection, clear camera and microphone indicators and explicit consent before recording [22].

Rokid's marketing also makes superlative claims that are hard to verify independently, among them that Rokid Glasses are the "world's lightest full-function AI & AR smart glasses" [7]. One Chinese industry assessment described Rokid's hardware as competent but lacking anything striking in concept or design, and warned that being too steady is itself a risk in an unsettled category [3].

References

  1. ^"Global AI glasses shipments reach 8.7 million units with Mainland China emerging as the fastest-growing market." Omdia, 2026-03-05. omdia.tech.informa.com/...e-fastest-growing-market
  2. ^"Rokid再获5亿元融资，10亿美元估值背后大量产品沦为闲置." 融中财经 via 36Kr, 2024-01-10. 36kr.com/...2598238298454662
  3. ^"XREAL vs Rokid，谁先拿下'智能眼镜第一股'？" 趣解商业 via 36Kr, 2026-04-02. 36kr.com/...3749473406972678
  4. ^"About Us: Pioneering the Future of AI Glasses." Rokid, accessed 2026-08-01. rokid.com/...about
  5. ^"Rokid: $110 million investment in data glasses future." MIXED Reality News, 2022-03-22. mixed-news.com/...nvestment-in-data-glasses-future
  6. ^"Rokid发布AI+AR眼镜Rokid Glasses，售价2499元，2025年第二季度上市." 36Kr, 2024-11-20. 36kr.com/...3042652312256899
  7. ^"Rokid Glasses Concludes Record-Breaking Kickstarter Campaign with $3.6 Million Raised." PR Newswire via Yahoo Finance, 2025-10-10. finance.yahoo.com/...des-record-breaking-022800071
  8. ^"Rokid Ai Glasses Style Now Available Worldwide, Surpassing 15,000 Units Sold." PR Newswire via The Manila Times, 2026-02-02. manilatimes.net/...2269915
  9. ^"AI glasses maker Rokid lands Toyota affiliate investment." Nikkei Asia, 2026-06-05. asia.nikkei.com/...nds-toyota-affiliate-investment
  10. ^"Rokid reportedly prepares Hong Kong IPO." TechNode, 2026-04-08. technode.com/...-reportedly-prepares-hong-kong-ipo
  11. ^"FULL EVENT VIDEOS: Rokid switches on its AI and AR smart glasses in Australia." iTWire, 2026-06-01. itwire.com/...ai-and-ar-smart-glasses-in-australia
  12. ^"Rokid Glasses (Display Smart Glasses)." Rokid, accessed 2026-08-01. global.rokid.com/...rokid-glasses
  13. ^Rutherford, Sam. "Rokid's smartglasses are surprisingly capable." Engadget, 2025-09-23. engadget.com/...are-surprisingly-capable-153027590
  14. ^"China's Rokid Targets Mass Market With New Bolon AI Smart Glasses." Yicai Global, 2025-11-17. yicaiglobal.com/...with-new-bolon-ai-smart-glasses
  15. ^Chen, Wency. "From smartphones to smart glasses: Rokid's latest AI frames join China's new device race." South China Morning Post, 2025-11-14. scmp.com/...-ai-frames-join-chinas-new-device-race
  16. ^"Rokid AI Glasses Neo." Rokid Germany store, accessed 2026-08-01. de.rokid.com/...rokid-ai-glasses-neo
  17. ^"Rokid Ai Glasses Style (Non-Display)." Rokid, accessed 2026-08-01. global.rokid.com/...rokid-ai-glasses-style
  18. ^"New Rokid Max 2 AR glasses with seamless diopter adjustment introduced." MIXED Reality News, 2024-04-23. mixed-news.com/...ss-diopter-adjustment-introduced
  19. ^"Global Intelligent Eyewear Market Up 83% YoY in Q1 2026 Driven by Strong AR, Smart Glasses Demand." Counterpoint Research, 2026-06-24. counterpointresearch.com/...iven-by-demand-q1-2026
  20. ^Cheng, Evelyn. "CNBC's The China Connection newsletter: China's AI glasses have something Meta doesn't." CNBC, 2026-04-13. cnbc.com/...id-virtual-screen-meta-ray-ban-display
  21. ^"Shipping Policy." Rokid, accessed 2026-08-01. global.rokid.com/...shipping-policy
  22. ^Jiang, Ben. "China keeps an eye on AI smart glasses as privacy concerns come into focus." South China Morning Post, 2026-06-26. scmp.com/...rt-glasses-privacy-concerns-come-focus
  23. ^Wu, Jessie. "AI glasses reportedly used to film flight attendants without consent, Rokid responds with action plan." TechNode, 2026-06-09. technode.com/...nt-rokid-responds-with-action-plan
  24. ^Billman, Savannah. "Company in the News: Rokid." The Wire China, 2026-05-10. thewirechina.com/...company-in-the-news-rokid
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  28. ^"Rokid Glasses." Rokid Japan store, accessed 2026-08-01. jp.rokid.com/...rokid-glasses

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