AR startup Brilliant Labs lands $3M in seed funding from Oculus and Siri founders

Brilliant Labs, an augmented reality startup focused on integrating artificial intelligence into everyday life, announced it has secured $3 million in seed funding to scale the team and invest in the development of its open-source, AI-powered smartglasses.

The round was led by Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, and Plug & Play Ventures.

Founded in 2019, it calls its design approach "embodied intelligence." Its monocular "Monocle" smart glasses development kit is an open-source device that will start shipping in February 2023, offering a single-lens design that clips onto existing glasses. Currently, the Monocle comes with a battery that can be quickly charged through the charging case, and has a battery life of up to 6 hours.

Similar to Google Glass, Brilliant Labs' Monocle renders text through a waveguide, allowing you to see important information while remaining present. Monocle is also equipped with embedded microphones, a computer vision camera and a programmable FPGA accelerator chip.

In addition to the latest funding round, Brilliant Labs also announced the launch of arGPT, the company’s first Monocle-adapted ChatGPT integration, allowing developers to directly use generative AI and build applications on top of arGPT.

"We believe generative artificial intelligence is a key enabler of augmented reality, so at Brilliant Labs we're building an open source ecosystem to support developers and creatives reimagining the future, and Monocle is just the beginning. We're excited to see A new class of smart experiences created by developers," said Bobak Tavangar, founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs. "We are very pleased to have the support of our investors to lead us into the new era of artificial intelligence and augmented reality."

Other investors in its seed round include Paylocity founder and Wayfarer Studios chairman Steve Sarowitz, former Oculus core team member and Framework founder Nirav Patel, former iPhone team member Francisco Tolmasky, and Moveon Technologies.