Shenzhen based Zhongjian Tech, founded by a former Appotronics (listed laser display company, also investing) research head, has drawn consumer headphone brand Shokz, Appotronics itself, and a HKUST professor as backers, betting that 2025's optics inflection lets one tunable…
Forty-two-year-old Zhang (a pseudonym) has worn glasses since junior high. Six months ago he noticed his phone screen blurring when he held it at his usual reading distance. He had to push it farther away to read a text, then pull it back to check a notification. That hand-to-arm's-length dance is the telltale sign of what Chinese opticians call "43 Guanguan," the eye hurdle that marks the onset of presbyopia for a generation raised on myopia. It is the problem progressive multifocal lenses, the "upper-distance, lower-near" design that has dominated for three decades, have never solved cleanly. The drawbacks are well known: narrow clear fields, dizziness on stairways, and a fitting process that requires a trained optician, adding hundreds of dollars to a pair that already runs ¥3,000–¥8,000.
Into that gap a new class of electro-tunable varifocal glasses is pushing. The mechanism is straightforward. Range-finder and posture sensors detect where the wearer is looking, and an electronic driver shifts the lens's diopter in real time. A single lens can focus on a phone screen at 30 cm and a road sign at 30 m. The idea has been around for years. What is new in 2025–2026 is that the underlying optics stack, smaller range sensors, lower-power driver ASICs, lighter tunable lens modules, has finally reached a cost-and-performance threshold that lets the product fit into a normal-looking frame and ship at consumer price points.
Zhongjian Tech (众见科技), a 2023 Shenzhen startup, is one of the first Chinese entrants trying to ride that inflection. Its founder, Zhao Peng, was a 26th National Physics Olympiad gold medalist, holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Tsinghua, and previously ran the research institute at Appotronics (光峰科技, 688007.SH), where he led AR glasses and novel-display work end-to-end. The company has now closed a tens-of-millions-RMB funding round spread across three closes, with headphone brand Shokz (韶音), listed optical-component maker Appotronics, HKUST professor Gao Bingqiang via the Gao-Feng Patient Capital Fund (and personally), institutional VCs Haochen Capital (昊辰资本) and SEEFund, and Qiuyu Capital (奇域资本) as exclusive financial adviser, according to a 36Kr exclusive report.
The investor list is more varied than the usual "star capital" framing suggests. Shokz is a consumer-electronics brand, best known for bone-conduction headphones, making a move into adjacent smart-wearable hardware. Appotronics is a publicly listed laser-display company that is also Zhao Peng's former employer, a relationship the founder has disclosed in the 36Kr interview and that investors should weigh when reading the round as validation. Gao Bingqiang is a HKUST professor of electronic and computer engineering whose Gao-Feng fund is known for backing deep-tech hardware, and whose personal check sits alongside the fund vehicle in this deal. Haochen and SEEFund are pure financial VCs. The round is described as "tens of millions of yuan" across three closes. No per-round breakdown or post-money valuation has been disclosed, so the size is company-stated.
The first-gen product is reportedly complete and is targeted at a 2026 crowdfunding launch, though no public spec sheet, weight, battery life, focus-switch speed, or price has been released yet. Every hardware claim in this story should be read as founder-stated until a crowdfunding page or teardown appears. The InnoHered company profile and the Liepin company page corroborate the company's Shenzhen registration and recruitment footprint.
Zhongjian is not alone in this category. The most-watched international comparable is IXI, a Finnish startup that raised $36.5 million in April 2025 from Amazon and others for autofocus prescription glasses (New Atlas explainer). In East Asia, Japan's ViXion01S launched in China and Japan as a separate autofocus eyewear product, reviewed by QQ News. Adaptive-focus sunglasses from Glance and EyesOn EyeCare and Elcyo's autofocal glasses line round out a thin but real category. Zhao Peng himself, in the 36Kr interview, acknowledged that "some startups overseas are doing this, but no particularly mature product has emerged," a useful hedge against any "world first" framing of Zhongjian. What the company is plausibly first in is the niche of daily-wear, myopia-plus-presbyopia electro-tunable glasses aimed at the Chinese mass consumer via crowdfunding.
Zhao Peng is also clear-eyed about what remains hard. Electro-tunable optics have to fit a normal-looking frame, draw little enough current to last a working day, switch focus fast enough that the user does not notice the transition, and survive a user-education cycle that progressive multifocals have already failed to compress. The "43 Guanguan" pain is real, and the funding round is real. The next trigger to watch is the crowdfunding page itself: spec sheet, price, and ship date. Until those land, this is a category bet with credible backers and a credible founder, not a product in buyers' hands.