Kura

Kura Technologies
Information
Industry	Augmented Reality
Founded	2016
Founder	Kelly Peng
Headquarters	San Francisco Bay Area, California
Notable Personnel	Kelly Peng (founder and CEO), Bayley Wang (co-founder, CSO)
Products	Kura Gallium AR glasses (announced, not shipped)
Website	https://kura-tech.com

Kura (Kura Technologies, also called Kura AR) is an American augmented reality startup that develops wide field of view AR glasses and the display, optics and chip technology behind them. The company has marketed the Gallium smartglasses, but they have not shipped: as of September 2026, the company's shop still offered the Gallium only as a reservation with a US$111 deposit. The Gallium glasses were advertised with a much wider field of view than existing AR headsets, up to 150 degrees.

The company was founded by Kelly Peng, who has led it as chief executive and chief technology officer. Its press releases give 2016 as the founding year and place the headquarters in Silicon Valley, while its website lists the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. The Gallium was a CES Innovation Awards honoree in 2022 and 2024, and Kura has announced silicon and display partnerships with TSMC and MICLEDI, but the German XR site MIXED reported in 2022 that it had given no public demonstrations and questioned whether its claims were real.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Company history, awards, partnerships, funding reports, Gallium specifications, prices and reservation status checked against Kura's website, its press releases, CES, ABI Research and the cited press (MIXED, The Ghost Howls, Road to VR, TechCrunch, Hackaday, Forbes, 36Kr, EEJournal). About review dates.

History

Origins as Aurora AR

Peng told The Ghost Howls in 2021 that she started Kura while still in school, first as a brain-machine interface startup. Kura's own press page states that the company's previous name was Aurora AR. Under that name it was one of 33 startups that HTC added to its Vive X accelerator in March 2017. Road to VR listed Aurora AR in the program's Shenzhen group and quoted its description of a first product with "a 135-degree field of view augmented reality glass that works under daylight". HTC remained among the company's investors: Peng said in 2021 that HTC was an investor, and Kura's website lists HTC Vive and UC Berkeley among its investors and supporters.

Kura was part of the 24th batch of the 500 Startups accelerator in 2018; TechCrunch described it as "a San Francisco-based developer of augmented reality glasses with micro-display and variable focus". In November 2018, at the Hackaday Superconference, Peng gave a talk on designing diffractive optics for AR. Hackaday's write-up said Kura was then working with diffractive waveguides and that Peng had found injection molding could produce the gratings far more cheaply than photolithography. Forbes named Peng to its 2019 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing and Industry category, describing Kura's glasses as reaching a 135-degree field of view. The profile said Kura had raised more than US$1.5 million since its founding in 2015 and expected to launch its Alpha product at CES the following year.

Gallium announcement

Peng announced the Kura Gallium on Twitter in September 2019. The Ghost Howls reported a 150-degree field of view, a resolution "in the range 4K-8K" and a very transparent display, and described the optics as a "pinhole effect" design in which small mirrors scattered across the lens reflect projected images into the eye. The report said Noah Zerkin, the maker of North Star headsets, had tried the glasses and been impressed, but its author said he had not been able to reach Peng and would suspend judgment until a reliable XR journalist published a hands-on. In a November 2019 episode of The AR Show podcast, Peng and then-COO Garrow Geer described the Gallium's goals as a 150-degree field of view, 95 percent transparency, brightness for indoor and outdoor use, and an eyeglasses form factor.

Funding and production plans (2021)

In March 2021 the Chinese tech outlet 36Kr reported that Kura had closed a Pre-A round worth several million US dollars from individual industry investors and company partners. The report gave 2017 as the year the company was set up in Silicon Valley, a team of 24 people, more than 20,000 units in pre-orders, more than 250 customers, and a plan to open an office in Shanghai that year; it listed General Motors, Tesla, Nike, T-Mobile and Caterpillar among early customers who had reserved or tried the product.

In a February 2021 interview with The Ghost Howls, Peng said developer kits would ship within one to two months and production units would follow late that year. She expected an initial price of about US$1,500, falling below US$1,000 at higher volume, and said the product had been designed for production runs of 100,000 to more than one million units. The developer kits described in the interview used 3D-printed holding parts and were pre-production hardware. The production target was missed: in April 2022 MIXED reported that nothing more had been heard of the mass-production plan.

CES awards and chip partnerships (2022)

In January 2022 the Gallium received a CES 2022 Innovation Award. Kura also announced that the glasses had won the MUO "Best Extended Reality Device" award at CES 2022. The January 2022 release also said Kura had been admitted to the semiconductor incubator Silicon Catalyst.

In April 2022 EEJournal reported that Kura had "just received their first silicon samples". On 14 June 2022 Kura announced a manufacturing collaboration with TSMC and said that its custom mixed-signal display driver integrated circuits for the Gallium's micro-LED display had been taped out on a standard, high-volume CMOS node at TSMC. In August 2022 it described Istara, an in-house optical design tool that it said used accelerated ray tracing and proprietary AI algorithms and ran more than 1,000 times faster than existing optical design software. On 5 October 2022 Kura and MICLEDI Microdisplays, a microLED display developer in Leuven, Belgium, announced a partnership under which MICLEDI would give Kura access to devices built in its 200 mm fab and early access to customized blue, green and red devices from its 300 mm wafer foundry. The two companies said they had already worked together for more than a year.

AI focus and later recognition (2023-2024)

In December 2023 Kura announced that its AR glasses had been named a CES 2024 Innovation Award honoree. The release recast the product around "first person view multimodal AI", with Peng describing an AI assistant that recognizes real-world objects and actions. It named Chuck Alger, formerly of Microsoft HoloLens and Surface, as general manager and Gregory Gallinat as COO, quoted SAIC Ventures, the venture arm of SAIC Motor and a strategic investor in Kura, and said Kura had orders and contracts from more than 400 companies and government agencies and had given demos to hundreds of users and professionals. It gave no shipping date. The CES listing names the honoree as the Kura Gallium Headset in the XR and Spatial Computing category.

In September 2024 the analyst firm ABI Research, after assessing 16 XR hardware companies, named Kura as one of four "hot tech innovators" alongside Xreal, TriLite and Varjo, citing its "ultra-bright displays and 150° field of view".

Kura Gallium

The Gallium is an eyeglass-style headset connected to a hip-mounted compute pack. Kura calls its optics a "structured geometric waveguide" and pairs them with a custom micro-LED image source and display ASICs; it says the combination gives more than 30 percent light efficiency at 95 percent transparency. Kura's product page lists the following specifications. None of them has been independently measured on a production unit.

Item	Kura's stated specification
Field of view	150 degrees (Peng in 2021: diagonal, about 120 degrees horizontal and 82-90 degrees vertical)
Resolution	Adjustable 8K/6K/4K with foveated display and rendering; 70 pixels per degree
Optics	95 percent transparent structured geometric waveguide eyepiece; focus range 10 cm to infinity; prescription compatible
Display	Micro-LED; 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage with up to 10-bit color; "4000-nit equivalent outdoors viewable image"
Tracking	6DoF head tracking (vision and IMU with onboard sensor fusion); eye tracking; 6DoF controller with gesture input
Cameras	Stereo cameras at 60 Hz for depth; 13 MP 10-bit visible-light camera at 20 Hz
Compute	USB Type-C link to a compute pack built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR platform, or to a workstation
Battery	Up to 6 hours untethered
Weight	Headset 80 g; compute pack under 200 g
IPD	Automatic adjustment, 55-68 mm
Software	APIs for Unreal Engine and Unity; Windows and Linux

Kura's shop takes a US$111 reservation deposit per headset, which it says counts toward the final price, and offers Gallium (with compute pack), Gallium Lite (headset only) and versions bundled with expert development support. The shop also takes order requests for Kura Alpha developer kits, which it describes as a limited number of pre-production kits to be shipped before the Gallium. The suggested retail prices differ between pages of the site: the products page lists US$1,499 for Gallium and US$1,099 for Gallium Lite, while the reservation page lists US$1,199 and US$899.

Skepticism

Kura's own CES 2022 release compared the 150-degree field of view with 52 degrees for the nearest competitor. In April 2022 MIXED wrote that the company offered no public demonstrations and, citing XR analyst Brad Lynch, that at CES 2022 it had only shown a smartphone app emulating the glasses. Citing Lynch and a whistleblower who had contacted him, MIXED also reported that a former chief operating officer had sued the startup, saying the COO had not been paid for years and had lent the company money that was never repaid; the whistleblower claimed that the company's claims had always been false. MIXED noted that Peng had not commented on the claims. It put Kura's funding at about US$5 million, citing Crunchbase.

See also

• AR Glasses
• Waveguide
• MicroLED
• Field of view