Cayden Pierce

Cayden Pierce is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mentra, an artificial intelligence hardware startup based in Boston, Massachusetts. Prior to launching his current company, he engineered the underlying hardware for the OpenSourceSmartGlasses project and collaborated directly with wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann. Pierce successfully demonstrated this open-source wearable technology at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) before joining the highly competitive MIT Media Lab as a graduate researcher. He subsequently dropped out of the academic institution in 2023 to commercialize his proactive computing research through Mentra, unveiling prototype hardware in late 2024 and securing an undisclosed pre-seed funding round in early 2025. Pierce's professional background merges open-source hardware engineering with human-computer interaction, while his current focus centers entirely on developing proactive artificial intelligence interfaces and commercializing next-generation smart glasses for real-time assistance.