Brilliant Labs
| Brilliant Labs | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Industry | Augmented Reality, Smart glasses |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Founder | Bobak Tavangar |
| Headquarters | Singapore |
| Notable Personnel | Bobak Tavangar (CEO), Raj Nakarja (Head of Engineering) |
| Products | Monocle, Frame, Halo |
| Website | https://brilliant.xyz |
Brilliant Labs is a consumer electronics company that designs lightweight Augmented Reality and AI-powered Smart glasses. It was founded in 2019 by Bobak Tavangar, a former program lead at Apple, and is known for shipping open-source eyewear: its hardware schematics and software are published publicly so developers can build their own applications.[1][2] The company was started in Hong Kong and later moved its headquarters to Singapore.[3][4]
Rather than building bulky Mixed Reality visors, Brilliant Labs makes products that look close to ordinary eyeglasses and lean on a connected phone and cloud services to provide their "AI superpowers." Across its lineup the company has positioned itself as an open, developer-friendly alternative to closed platforms from larger firms.[1][5]
History
Brilliant Labs was founded in 2019. Its first widely covered product, the Brilliant Monocle, reached the market in early 2023 as a small clip-on AR lens aimed at developers and hardware tinkerers.[1] In June 2023 the company disclosed a 3 million US dollar seed round backed by Brendan Iribe (co-founder of Oculus), Adam Cheyer (co-founder of Siri), Eric Migicovsky (founder of Pebble), and Plug and Play Ventures.[1] By that point Brilliant Labs said it had built a community of close to 2,000 developers on its Discord server.[1]
In February 2024 the company announced its first full pair of glasses, the Brilliant Labs Frame, and revealed a further investment from John Hanke, the chief executive of Niantic (the studio behind Pokemon GO). TechCrunch reported the company's total financing at around 6 million US dollars at that time.[2] In 2025 Brilliant Labs introduced a second-generation product, Halo, expanding from a developer-focused lens to an all-day wearable with a color display.[5]
Technology
Brilliant Labs centers its products on an open-source software stack and an AI assistant called Noa. Noa is a multimodal agent that can take input from the glasses' camera and microphone, answer questions, search the web, and translate speech.[4][5] On the Frame, Noa stitched together several third-party models: OpenAI's GPT-4 for visual analysis and text, OpenAI's Whisper for speech recognition, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion for image generation, and Perplexity for conversational web search.[2][4]
The company's software is released under a permissive open-source license, with code, hardware manuals, and example projects hosted on GitHub.[4] Its later Halo glasses run a Lua scripting environment built on top of the Zephyr open-source operating system, and pair with a cross-platform mobile companion app.[5][6] The company has emphasized privacy, stating that its glasses do not record or store a user's life and that sensor data on Halo is converted into an irreversible mathematical representation rather than kept as raw footage.[4][6]
Products
Brilliant Labs' catalog has moved from a single clip-on AR module toward complete, all-day Smart glasses. All three products are sold as open hardware.
| Product | Year | Type | Price (USD) | Notable specs and notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brilliant Monocle | 2023 | Clip-on AR lens | 349 | Pocket-sized open-source AR module weighing about 15 grams; built around five processors including a hackable FPGA accelerator; camera, microphone, and capacitive touch; clips to eyewear or held to the eye[1] |
| Brilliant Labs Frame | 2024 | AI smart glasses | 349 | Announced February 8, 2024; about 39 grams; 640 x 400 micro OLED display; 720p low-power camera; Windsor-style frame; Noa assistant; prescription lens options; preorders opened the same day with April shipping[2][4] |
| Halo | 2025 | AI smart glasses | 299 | Unveiled August 1, 2025; just over 40 grams; 0.2-inch color Micro-OLED heads-up display; Alif Semiconductor B1 chip with on-device NPU; up to 14-hour battery; bone-conduction speakers; six-axis IMU; Bluetooth 5.3; ships late 2025[5][6] |
Brilliant Monocle
The Brilliant Monocle was the company's debut device, launched in early 2023 at 349 US dollars. It is a small, open-source AR lens that can be clipped onto a pair of glasses or held up to the eye, packing a camera, microphone, capacitive touch sensor, and a display into roughly 15 grams. It included a field-programmable gate array intended to let developers experiment with custom on-device processing.[1] Early demonstrations, including a Stanford student project called rizzGPT that suggested conversation responses in real time, helped the Monocle gain a following in the open-source hardware community.[1]
Brilliant Labs Frame
The Brilliant Labs Frame, announced on February 8, 2024, was the company's first complete pair of glasses. Weighing about 39 grams, it used a 640 x 400 micro OLED display and a 720p low-power camera, and was styled after classic Windsor-style eyeglasses.[2][4] The Frame's main draw was the Noa assistant, which combined GPT-4, Whisper, Stable Diffusion, and Perplexity to handle visual questions, translation, image generation, and web search.[2][4] It launched at 349 US dollars with prescription lens options and began shipping in 2024.[2]
Halo
Halo, unveiled on August 1, 2025, marked Brilliant Labs' shift toward an all-day wearable. Priced at 299 US dollars, it added a 0.2-inch full-color Micro-OLED heads-up display, two bone-conduction speakers, a microphone array, a six-axis IMU with tap detection, and a low-power optical sensor used only for AI inference.[5][6] It is powered by an Alif Semiconductor B1 chip with a dedicated neural processing unit for on-device AI, rated for up to 14 hours of battery life, and connects over Bluetooth 5.3.[5] Halo introduced new Noa features including a "Narrative" agentic memory system that builds a personalized knowledge base over time, and an experimental "Vibe Mode" that lets users create small apps with spoken natural-language commands.[6] Preorders opened at launch, with global shipping expected in late 2025.[5][6]
Funding and ownership
Brilliant Labs is a privately held startup. It raised a 3 million US dollar seed round announced in June 2023, led by angel investors including Brendan Iribe, Adam Cheyer, and Eric Migicovsky, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures.[1] In February 2024 it added an investment from Niantic chief executive John Hanke, with reported total financing of around 6 million US dollars.[2] The company's leadership includes founder and chief executive Bobak Tavangar and head of engineering Raj Nakarja.[4][3]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 "Brilliant Labs puts AI in front of your eye with its tiny open source AR lens". 2023-06-27. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/brilliant-labs-puts-ai-in-front-of-your-eye-with-its-tiny-open-source-ar-lens/.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "AR glasses with multimodal AI nets funding from Pokemon GO creator". 2024-02-08. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/ar-glasses-with-multimodal-ai-attracts-funding-from-pokemon-go-founder/.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Brilliant Labs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Labs.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 "How Brilliant Labs wants Frame to weave AI into your life". https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/frame-ai.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 "Brilliant Labs Unveils All-day Smart Glasses with Color Display, Pre-orders Launch at $300". 2025-08-01. https://roadtovr.com/brilliant-labs-halo-smart-glasses-price-release-date/.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 "Brilliant Labs launches Halo: AI smartglasses that last all day". 2025-07-31. https://skarredghost.com/2025/07/31/brilliant-labs-halo/.