Founded by Cayden Pierce and Alexander Israelov, Mentra is a YC Winter 2025 company that 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.
At Mentra, they are building MentraOS – an open-source operating system and miniapp store designed to solve the fragmentation problem that has held the smart glasses industry back. By creating a unified platform with a single SDK, developers can now build applications once and deploy them across any supported pair of smart glasses. The team also ships their own hardware, Mentra Live, which runs natively on MentraOS.
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.
We’ve asked them a couple of questions about their startup journey; read their responses in Infra Bytes’ newsletter to learn more about the great minds behind Mentra.