1 Year of Mentra
As of November 25, it’s been one year since we founded Mentra. We now stand on the precipice of two product releases that will change everything for us. We hope it changes everything for many of you, too.
Why We’re Building Mentra
500 million years ago, we were far simpler creatures, guided almost entirely by instinct and running on the oldest layer of the brain. Then, about 50 million years ago, evolution accelerated as the neocortex wrapped itself around that ancient circuitry, forming a second processing layer. Then, just 5,000 years ago, the exocortex emerged as our technological third processing layer. We reach this new layer through interfaces such as pens, paper, keyboards, and screens, tools that extend our communication, memory, and reasoning. Now smart glasses are becoming the next interface, bringing the exocortex directly into our field of view.
Mobile phones are still the leading interface today. We take our phones out of our pockets 200 times a day just to get the display in front of our eyes and speaker near our ears. But smart glasses are about to take the lead because they’re better than mobile phones.
They’re better because they’re hands-free, so you can take a video while you’re holding the baby or see live translations while you’re eating, without holding your phone.
They’re better because they’re heads up, so you can read subtitles while talking with your friends or navigate a new city while still enjoying the view.
They’re better because they capture context, so when you’re at the store you can ask your AI “what did my wife ask me to grab?” or you can save notes from real life meetings.
They’re better because they combine the digital and physical worlds. Smart glasses can overlay whatever you need directly onto your surroundings: a 3D map at the mall, restaurant reviews as you walk by, live bus schedules, spatial messages like digital sticky notes, 3D CAD models, or new furniture previewed in your living room.
One of the most important platforms to ever evolve was the Internet. An intercompatible mesh of open protocols came together to make something amazing possible. Now different people and technologies could talk to each other and work together. But over the past 20 years, big tech has divided the Internet into closed-down, incompatible zones. At the same time, Android and iOS have massively restricted what third party apps can do, as Android grows more closed and controlling. The fantastic future we imagined is being stolen from us because computers, programs, and networks are incompatible and closed-down ecosystems. Google and Apple disallow the existence of competing apps like AI assistants. This limiting of competition slows innovation and restricts the freedom of users.
We don’t want a closed-down, closed-source, walled-garden, restricted API future. We want the next personal computer to be like the early internet: open, interconnected, and intercompatible. That’s what Mentra is here to do.
But where are the smart glasses? It’s just now become possible to build consumer smart glasses thanks to waveguide, display, and audio component miniaturization, but the smart glasses OS is still missing. Smart glasses create new problems for an OS to solve, like where apps run when the glasses are too power constrained to run workloads locally. How can we allow multiple apps/agents to share the sensors and interfaces at the same time? How can we make it so that developers build one app that runs on any pair of smart glasses and any type of phone? These are the challenges that must be solved by the smart glasses OS, and they’re the challenges that Mentra is here to face.
We’re building MentraOS because we believe that if an open, shared, community-driven OS wins smart glasses, it will maximize human freedom. Let's build this together.
The Next Iteration of MentraOS
After deploying MentraOS for 11 months to thousands of users, we’ve seen what apps get 10x more use than the others: captions, translation, and proactive AI. By the end of the summer, we saw that to excel at those specific apps, and to work in areas of the world with weaker internet connections, we needed to redesign our entire data pipeline, so we refactored MentraOS to the core.
MentraOS 3.0 is the result of that effort. We redesigned the UI to be easier to use and look beautiful, and we redesigned the data pipeline to keep live captions fast, accurate, and reliable in all situations - think blazing captions even on the subway. We want it to be your portal to unlock the best captions, translation, and proactive AI glasses experience possible. And it’s launching in January.
Infrastructure for Builders
Over this past year, we’ve seen the market’s incredible desire to build. A lot of highly capable people want to build with smart glasses, but they’ve needed infrastructure to do so, and MentraOS is that infra. The market is realizing that MentraOS is how you build smart glasses apps, and breathing a sigh of relief that finally there is a way.
With Mentra Live, this sentiment has doubled due to the hardware component - we’re unlocking things that no smart glasses have ever been able to do. Many highly capable people saw the potential of Meta Ray-Ban AI Glasses but then failed to build their idea because there was no SDK. Not anymore, thanks to Mentra Live. Imagine glasses helping blind people see, helping delivery drivers record deliveries, and helping leaders automatically take notes in a meeting.
It’s time to unleash the market to work together to build the next personal computer.
Mentra Timeline
In just 1 year, we launched MentraOS to thousands of users, built a pair of smart glasses that beat Meta Ray-Ban (Mentra Live), grew to a team of 16 of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with, and are just gearing up for our two biggest launches ever. As I reflect and put together this timeline, I’m shaking with excitement for what the next 6 months will bring.
December 2024: Cayden drops out of MIT. YC acceptance. Team goes to Shenzhen for two weeks sourcing a “compute puck” and working on MentraOS.
January 2025: YC W25. Team moves into a hacker house two blocks away. Launch MentraOS 1.0.
February 2025: MentraOS 1.0 proves too complicated and unreliable, and only works on Android. Team begins rewrite that becomes MentraOS 2.0.
March–April 2025: Raise seed round.
May 2025: Use funding to kick off Mentra’s smart glasses hardware program in Shenzhen.
June 2025: Begin hiring software and hardware team. Headcount grows from 3 in January to 16 by November.
July 2025: Launch MentraOS 2.0. Cayden must leave the USA, goes to Shenzhen, and starts O-1 visa process.
August 2025: First third-party app launches on Mentra Market.
September 2025: Cayden receives O-1 and returns to the USA. Focus on B2B pilots, hitting 50 businesses pre-ordering Mentra Live.
October 2025: Software team building MentraOS 3.0. Hit 5,000 developers in Discord.
November 2025: Reach 5 smart glasses hardware companies running MentraOS. Cayden and Carl (VP of Eyewear) go to Shenzhen to finalize Mentra Live for production and prepare Mentra Display for the first prototype build.
Late November 2025: Kick off manufacturing for the first 1,000 units.
Now it’s time to ship. The next six months will decide everything.
What's Next
Next post, I’ll outline what the next year will look like for Mentra and our community as we continue to build our vision for the next personal computer together. Join the movement by signing up for the mailing list and be part of the conversation by joining the Discord.