Connet Optical invests 180 million yuan in Lingban Technology, Zhu Mingming's Rokid completes share reform, industry chain capital jointly bets on smart glasses | Yangtze River Delta Capital Bureau

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By|Sina Finance Shanghai Station, Shili

On March 29, Hong Kong-listed company Cannyte Optics (02276) released an announcement saying that the company plans to invest 180 million RMB from its own funds to participate in the latest round of financing of Lingban Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. After completion, its shareholding ratio will not exceed 5%.

This move by industrial capital not only reflects Cannyte Optics’ strategic bet on the smart glasses sector, but also brings the story of Lingban Technology’s founder and CEO Zhu Mingming’s years of exploration in AR and AI interaction technologies back to the core perspective where technology and capital intersect.

Lingban Technology was founded in 2014. Its founder, Zhu Mingming, was originally the head of the M Studio at Alibaba, and he was known in the industry for his engineer-like persistence. More than ten years ago, when most people were still at the stage of imagining interactions for smartphones and tablets, Zhu Mingming had already firmly believed that “smart glasses will be an important terminal that changes the future.” Over more than ten years, he led his team from scratch, gradually refining optical components, AI algorithms, and interaction systems, and building Rokid into an important consumer smart glasses brand in China.

During this process, Zhu Mingming was not always smooth sailing. Until February 18, 2025, at a high-quality economic development conference in Yuhang District, Hangzhou, a scene recorded by multiple media outlets helped him and Rokid truly “break out of the niche.” On that day, when he took the stage to deliver a speech, he neither looked down at printed briefing notes nor used a traditional teleprompter—instead, he wore Rokid Glasses he developed himself, with his speech script displayed directly on the lenses. He used an intelligent ring in his hand to turn pages and completed the entire talk without notes—“My speech notes are in the glasses, and page-turning is done through the ring in my hand.” The quote quickly caught fire on social media and was reported by mainstream outlets such as CCTV News.

Behind this “tech demonstration” is Zhu Mingming’s repeated refinement of product practicality. In an interview with media, he once said that during the evolution of smart glasses, “technology should serve people, not create a gap,” emphasizing the importance of products solving users’ real pain points in real scenarios, rather than simply stacking up features.

As a traditional manufacturer of optometry-related devices, Cannyte Optics’ investment in Lingban Technology is clearly not merely a straightforward financial arrangement. In the announcement, Fei Zhengxiang, the company’s executive director and general manager, emphasized that this investment will deepen the company’s strategic layout in the smart glasses field, enhance the synergy effects across the industrial chain, and strengthen cooperation with industry leading enterprises.

In recent years, Cannyte Optics has continued to seek diversification of its product lines. Earlier this year, it also announced that it had signed a joint venture agreement with Goertek Optics to develop AI/AR/VR/MR glasses. The collaboration covers the R&D and production of optoelectronic components such as smart glasses customized lenses, optical waveguide eyepieces, and electroluminescent color-changing and eye-tracking technologies. Now betting on Lingban Technology signals that it is accelerating not only its layout in the “glasses manufacturing” dimension, but also its push toward the “smart glasses ecosystem.”

For Lingban Technology, the ongoing entry of industrial capital provides tangible chips for its push toward going public. The company previously completed a restructuring into a joint-stock system, and its new entity, “Lingban Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd.,” has already made its debut. It has also formed multi-party synergies across the supply chain, algorithm capabilities, and optical components. Since this year began, upstream companies in the industrial chain such as Lens Technology have successively taken stakes or deepened cooperation, and the gathering of capital and technical resources is building a situation of “industrial synergy resonance.”

For Zhu Mingming, this journey—from product practicality validation to capital recognition—is both an extension of his personal view on technology and product, and a microcosm of China’s smart glasses industry moving from “edge-of-the-lab experiments” toward a larger stage.

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Responsible editor: Chang Fuqiang