Cayden Pierce and Alexander Israelov didn’t meet at a startup accelerator or a tech conference – they found each other on Reddit in 2022, bonded over a shared obsession with smart glasses, and spotted a gap nobody else had filled yet.
Pierce had been building smart glasses in his university dorm in 2018 and had gone on to work with the inventor of smart glasses before joining the MIT Media Lab. Israelov had been independently experimenting with smart glasses throughout his CS degree, including time spent at a spatial computing company in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Together, the duo formed TeamOpenSmartGlasses (one of the earliest communities of smart glasses hackers) and demoed OpenSourceSmartGlasses at CES 2023. In 2024, Pierce dropped out of MIT, and Israelov quit his job to found Mentra, a YC Winter 2025 company.
With Mentra, the founders are tackling a fragmentation problem that has quietly held the smart glasses industry back: every brand speaks its own language, making it nearly impossible for developers to build once and ship everywhere. Their solution? MentraOS – an open-source operating system and miniapp store that lets developers deploy to any supported pair of glasses with a single SDK. They also ship their own hardware, Mentra Live, running natively on MentraOS.
Their vision has attracted a notable roster of believers. Mentra has raised an $8 million seed round backed by Y Combinator, Amazon, Toyota Ventures, Hartmann Capital, Paul Graham, Rich Miner (Android co-founder), and more.
Mentra is a MongoDB self-serve customer and we have asked the team a few questions regarding their journey. Read on below!
What inspired you to start your company?
In late 2024, we noticed that smart glasses hardware had finally become ready for consumers to wear. However, there was a problem: the software wasn’t ready. Each brand of glasses had its own communication protocol, making it impossible for developers to build apps that run on every pair of glasses.
This problem is already solved for smartphones. You write one app for iOS + Android, and it runs on all the phones. In 2024, glasses lacked an equivalent operating system.
Without an operating system, smart glasses cannot succeed. So, we started Mentra to build the open operating system for glasses.
What does your product do, and how does it work under the hood?
Mentra uses MongoDB to store user and app data, and to power our “simple storage” feature that we expose to developers building on MentraOS. MentraOS makes it possible to get and build apps for smart glasses.
It gives smart glasses a miniapp store that allows users to download new apps, and gives developers a simple SDK they can use to build apps that run on any brand of supported glasses. When a new pair of glasses launch, their app automatically works on them.
We also make Mentra Live: smart glasses with a camera, speakers, and microphone that run on MentraOS.
What milestone or moment has been most meaningful for your startup so far?
Launching MentraOS was our most meaningful milestone. We shipped with a handful of miniapps, including "Live Captions", which was originally just a debugging tool for our speech-to-text system. After launch, we started interviewing users and discovered something we never anticipated: a large portion were deaf or hard of hearing, and Live Captions had become their most-used feature. Hearing how much real-time transcription improved their daily lives completely reshaped our product strategy. It reinforced a core lesson: you can't predict your most important use case... you have to ship, listen, and let your users show you.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to founders building startups today?
Build for what exists today. In the smart glasses space, I constantly see founders designing for hardware that doesn't exist yet (think: navigation apps for headsets that can't go outside, or LLMs that are supposed to run on glasses with half a megabyte of ram). The better question is: given today's hardware and all its limitations, how can I provide real value right now? Constraints force you into the use cases that actually matter.
What’s your favorite coffee shop in San Francisco?
Blue Bottle 100%
Where can our community connect with you?
You can connect with the Mentra team on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and GitHub. To learn more about what Mentra is creating, check out their website.
Thank you to the Mentra team for sharing their insight and information about their founder journey!