Some innovations take off more quickly than others. While smart glasses have now been available for years, adoption rates remain relatively modest. However, the Swiss start-up Mosaic SoC , which is today announcing the successful completion of a $3.8 million seed funding round, thinks its technology could help smart glasses become far more mainstream.

Founded in 2024 by Alfio Di Mauro and Moritz Scherer, two electrical engineers who met while completing their PhDs at technical university ETH Zurich, Mosaic designs and builds chips developed specifically for devices such as smart glasses. “We saw a gap in the market for a custom-made product,” explains Di Mauro, now the firm’s CEO. “We design our chips from the ground up, rather than depending on technology licensed from third parties.”

For this part of the consumer electronics market, that really matters. Products such as augmented reality glasses must incorporate chips that are powerful enough to deliver the features they promise but small and light enough for easy integration. In practice, manufacturers often use chips developed for other purposes, scaling them down when putting them into glasses. The result is still too bulky – many smart glasses wearers complain about their weight – and often lacking in functionality.

Mosaic has taken a different approach, Di Mauro explains, based on years of research by the founders that began before they even thought about the commercial applications. “We built Mosaic to deliver real-time perception at a fraction of the energy, so battery-powered devices can understand their environment without compromising form factor.”

Mosaic’s custom-made chips are so small and efficient that they can be incorporated into smart glasses that look indistinguishable from an ordinary pair of spectacles, the company claims. This is achieved with no compromise on performance – the chip’s integrated circuits can process visual and positional data so that the devices have a real-time understanding of where they are and what's around them.

That could help transform the smart glasses market, where analysts are still expecting rapid growth if manufacturers can come up with the right product. A recent report from Grand View Research says the global smart glasses market was worth only $2.46 billion last year but estimates it could grow to $14.38 billion by 2033. That would represent average annual growth of more than 24% between now and then.

Mosaic has already signed a contract with one major smart glasses manufacturer, though it’s bound by confidentiality agreements. Worth around $1.5 million, the deal has seen Mosaic co-design a chip specifically for its partner’s glasses. Now the company is turning its attention to designing a generic product it can sell to multiple manufacturers, providing a full application layer that these firms would build on top of. It hopes to have this chip available by the end of the year.

Today’s pre-seed round will provide the company, which already has six employees, with the financial firepower to reach that point. The round is led by the Swiss pre-seed fund Founderful with participation from the Swiss innovation group Kick Foundation.

“The next billion smart devices will see and understand the world around them, and Mosaic SoC’s product is the chip that makes that possible at scale,” says Antonia Albert, an investor at Founderful. “Alfio and Moritz have the architecture, the platform vision and the team to make it happen.”

Looking further ahead, the company is also confident its products and approach will have applications well beyond the smart glasses market. For example, in a smartphone, its chips could be used as a co-processor for the front camera, enabling it to operate as an always-on device, tracking the environment it sees, without draining the phone’s battery very rapidly. Mosaic also sees itself evolving into a platform supplier, providing the framework through which manufacturers develop and deploy applications around its chips.

Competition from large-scale chip manufacturers is inevitable, but the giants of the industry have so far seen this niche of the market as too small to devote significant research and development funding to, Di Mauro says. That has given Mosaic a head start worth several years in terms of closing the gap between what’s available and what’s needed from these products.

“The gap is that existing chips can deliver intelligence when power and space are available, but manufacturers increasingly need that intelligence to run continuously in devices where power, space, heat and battery capacity are severely constrained,” Di Mauro explains.