Two Harvard students built 10 projects together in a makerspace before finding the one that made them drop everything. Now Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen have raised $6.6 million to challenge Meta's (NASDAQ:META) dominance in smart glasses with a radically different vision: glasses that remember every conversation, meeting, and detail of your life while weighing half as much as Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The Halo Nova, now rebranded as Mira, co-founders gained international attention when their face recognition demonstration using smart glasses landed in The New York Times as a privacy warning.
Rather than backing away from the controversy, they channeled that momentum into building what they believe will divide humanity into two groups: those with augmented intelligence and those without.
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Ardayfio’s journey began as a daily ChatGPT user who recognized a gap between digital and physical world AI assistance. Speaking in a joint email interview with Benzinga, he said: “I had been using ChatGPT frequently as a daily user for every facet of my life (everything from brainstorming and answering questions to internet research), and I realized there were a lot of times where I wanted to do that in my real life—not just when I’m on a computer.”
Ardayfio noticed this gap most clearly in situations where precision mattered, including investor interactions and team brainstorming sessions, where immediate context and facts would have helped.
The divide between augmented and unaugmented humans will reshape jobs, relationships, and politics, according to the Mira founders. Mark Zuckerberg recently described smart glasses as humanity’s path to superintelligence, aligning with their vision.
“We see the product as an enhancement rather than a replacement,” the founders wrote in the email to Benzinga. Users with augmented intelligence will perform at dramatically higher levels than those without the technology.
Ardayfio and Nguyen provided a concrete example in the email: “Let’s say you’re in a sales meeting–you’ll be able to use the power of an entire [large language model] to help make you smarter, recall relevant insights, and thus come up with consistently better ideas”
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Challenging Meta in smart glasses demands a clear point of separation, and the Mira team outlined two areas where they believe they stand apart. Their focus centers on hardware built for continuous use, contrasting with Meta's heavier, more traditional interface-driven designs.
Mira's glasses were engineered for everyday wear with a frame estimated at roughly half the weight of Meta's Ray-Ban display lineup, response times under 900 milliseconds, and a battery expected to support a full day.
Those performance numbers come from extensive backend tuning that accelerates large-language models supplied by Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, GOOGL)) and Anthropic, helping the system deliver answers faster than many cloud-based services. “We’ve decided to lean into the mission of putting the design needs of people first with an all-day wearable,” the founders wrote.
Mira relies on top-tier language models and pairs them with its own agent framework built entirely by its internal engineering group. The system is designed to process extensive conversation histories and transform them into structured memory that can be surfaced when needed.
The founders argue the distinction between Mira and Meta lies less in physical design and more in the underlying philosophy guiding each company's vision for AI-enabled wearables. “We’re taking the bet that the key unlock for the mass-adoption of smartglasses is a hyper-intelligent second brain for you to remember everything and get daily proactive insights, while Meta is focused on building a Siri-style assistant to answer basic questions,” they said in the email.
This distinction drives every user interaction. Rather than asking basic questions like current smart assistants, users receive proactive insights based on their conversation history and current context.
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Mira’s approach to privacy may seem contradictory at first, but it becomes clearer when you understand its architecture, the founders wrote in the email. The glasses capture conversations but immediately delete audio recordings, keeping only transcripts stored locally on users’ devices.
“We operate with a human-first mission and firmly believe that users should be completely in control of their data. So, we dropped out of Harvard and dedicated our lives to building this project out,” the founders wrote. They added that the company never sells or trains on user data, addressing the fundamental trust issue that has plagued always-listening devices.
The device deliberately excludes cameras. “Our device does not have a camera, meaning that when you’re going into these meetings or conversations, you are not visually recording people, you’re only taking a brief audio transcript of what has been said,” Ardayfio and Nguyen told Benzinga.
When users enter meetings or conversations, the glasses capture audio transcripts rather than visual recordings. The artificial intelligence cannot distinguish between different speakers except for the wearer’s voice, providing privacy protection for others in conversations.
“We never store the audio of the conversation, just the transcript, similar to taking notes in a meeting,” Ardayfio and Nguyen wrote in the email. Users are required to ask for consent when recording, in line with the norms applied across the wearable technology sector.
Data security remains paramount in Mira's architecture, structured to minimize privacy risks fundamentally. "All of the users’ conversations are stored locally on their personal device, so we’re actually not building up an internal data set of conversations,” the founders said.
This approach makes law enforcement requests moot. “The easiest way to handle law enforcement requests for this data is by not storing user data. Even if law enforcement were to request it, it would not exist anymore–just transcripts in the same way you’d take notes,” the founders wrote.
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Ardayfio and Nguyen reject narratives about AI replacing human capabilities, envisioning technology that frees humans for deeper connections.
"We look to free users from having to think about the minute details from work and focus on the much more important things in life," they told Benzinga. “We want humans to dive into what makes them so special. To spend time on what only humans can do, and what an AI can’t.”
The two founders introduce “vibe thinking,” representing a fundamental shift in human cognition patterns.
“‘Vibe thinking’ is a completely different paradigm of how people think,” they wrote in the email. They added that everyday conversations usually unfold without any technological support until someone turns to a computer.
“Right now, people look for answers and insights by distracting themselves from the moment (looking down at their phone). We’re flipping that,” the Mira founders said. "We're creating one of the first devices that is meant to support your real-life moments seamlessly."
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The founders first crossed paths at a Harvard makerspace, where they collaborated on multiple builds before spotting the idea with true potential. Falling hardware costs combined with advances in AI opened the door for their product.
“What made us realize that this idea was the one was the convergence of many key technologies,” Ardayfio and Nguyen recalled. Smart glasses hardware became cheap and accurate enough for widespread adoption.
“Unlike Google Glass, which came out 15 years ago, we now have smartglasses that only cost a few hundred dollars, look like normal glasses, and include a beautiful display. This just wasn’t possible a couple of years ago,” they said.
Language model APIs now cost literal cents per query, eliminating the need to handcraft AI assistants from scratch like Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri. “Once we brought these two realizations together, it was very much an ‘a-ha’ moment,” the Mira founders told Benzinga.
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At $349, Mira matches Meta Ray-Ban pricing while offering fundamentally different value. “We’ve crafted our technology and manufacturing relationships so that the product is accessible to a broad market of people, aligned with our mission of daily-wear for any professional,” Ardayfio and Nguyen said.
The startup’s primary engineering focus involves converting massive conversation data into actionable memories. “We’re the first company to take in thousands of hours of conversations and convert that into memory that can be useful to you. Creating this super memory system has been where we’ve dedicated most of our engineering time as a company,” the Mira founders wrote in the email.
Ardayfio and Nguyen envision human conversations focusing on high-level content rather than minutiae. Email composition, fact-checking, and customer interactions become automated background tasks.
“Rather than thinking about the minutia of how to send a specific email, look up any fact, or talk to a specific customer, you can subject more time to more meaningful things, like ‘What ideas should I be brainstorming to begin with?', or ‘What do I want to learn out of this meeting or conversation?'” the Mira founders said.
“We now have a historically powerful LLM that’s capturing your memories and synthesizing them to help you excel in your daily life,” Ardayfio and Nguyen said.
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