By Charlie Fink

San Francisco-based startup Mentra has raised $8 million to launch MentraOS 2.0, an open-source operating system designed specifically for smart glasses. The round includes some of Silicon Valley’s most iconic names: Rich Miner (co-founder of Android), Jawed Karim (co-founder of YouTube), Eric Migicovsky (Pebble), Paul Graham, Y Combinator, and the venture arms of Toyota and Amazon.

The company’s goal is as ambitious as it is timely: to become the default software layer for a new generation of lightweight XR glasses. Founder and CEO Cayden Pierce calls it “the Android for smart glasses,” built for continuous wear, real-time AI, and cloud-native applications. The platform already supports multiple hardware options and powers live captioning, translation, notifications, and an AI assistant.

“The hardware is finally ready, the AI is here—but there’s still no OS,” Pierce said. “We’re not building hype demos. We’re building the infrastructure for the next personal computer.”

Pierce spent time at the University of Toronto with Steve Mann, one of the inventors of wearable computing, and later joined the MIT Media Lab under Pattie Maes. He met co-founder Alexander Israelov while building open-source smart glasses out of an RV in Canada.