Mosaic SoC Raises $3.8M to Build Low-Power Perception Chips for Smart Glasses

Swiss semiconductor startup Mosaic SoC, an ETH Zurich spinout, has closed a $3.8 million pre-seed round led by Founderful with participation from Kick Foundation. The company is building perception chips designed to bring real-time spatial awareness to consumer wearables — specifically AR smart glasses.

What Mosaic SoC Is Building

Mosaic SoC's chip enables a device to build a local map of its surroundings and the objects within it in real time, while consuming minimal power. The company claims its chips will be small enough and efficient enough to make smart glasses indistinguishable from regular glasses — tackling the bulk and battery problems that have plagued AR hardware.

Use Cases

• Spatial mapping: Build floor plans on the fly, recall where objects were last seen
• Object recognition: Identify and track objects in the user's environment
• AR anchoring: Place digital content precisely in the real world without cloud processing

Business Traction

Founded in 2024 by Moritz Scherer and Alfio Di Mauro, the company says it has already generated meaningful revenue from NRE (non-recurring engineering) contracts with ODM partners in its first year. As chips reach the market, revenue will shift from engineering contracts to scalable chip sales.

What This Means for Buyers

You won't buy a Mosaic chip directly, but their technology could show up in the next generation of consumer smart glasses from brands like Meta, XREAL, or upcoming Android XR devices. The current generation of smart glasses — including the Ray-Ban Meta at $379 — still relies on phone processing for most AI tasks. On-device spatial awareness could change that. Track the smart glasses market in our smart glasses comparison guide.