Deepnight Secures $5.5M Funding to Revolutionize Night Vision Technology with AI

YC grad Deepnight nabs $5.5M for AI night vision software that disrupts a multi-billion dollar industry | TechCrunch

Deepnight co-founders Lucas Young and Thomas Li have been friends since childhood. Both were working as software engineers at Google when Young decided he wanted to crack the code, so to speak, on a problem that had plagued the U.S. military for decades: digital night vision tech. Most night vision technology is still analog. Goggles use optical lenses and a chemical process to convert the scant light at night into images, Young told TechCrunch. And they cost from $13,000 to $30,000 apiece from military contractors like L3Harris and Elbit America. For years, the U.S. Army has been trying to digitize the tech, mostly focused on the hardware. A case in point: the $22 billion budget for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project that Anduril just took over from Microsoft and its Hololens tech. Young, who has a degree in computational photography from CalPoly, spent five years working on smartphone camera software. He wrote code that offset the limitations of the tiny aperture, cheap $50 digital cameras used in smartphones. And Li's background is in AI tech, particularly computer vision. One day, Young read a scientific paper from 2018 called Learning to See in the Dark co-authored by well-known scientist Vladlen Koltun, who is currently at Apple. It discussed using AI for low-light imaging, but at the time, on-device AI chips weren't fast enough to support the 90 frames per second (fps) necessary for realtime viewing. In 2024, Young realized that AI accelerators running on System on Chips (SoCs) had advanced enough to support 90 fps. He talked his friend Li into quitting their jobs and founding a startup called Deepnight. And they promptly got into the Y Combinator winter cohort. The military was their first obvious customer, but they couldn't just roll up to the Pentagon and book a meeting. So, Young found an industry event where people from the U.S. Army's night vision laboratory were in attendance. He wrote a white paper that outlined his idea: night vision as a software problem. He handed out copies at the event, including to an army colonel who agreed to read the paper. "It was just a hallway conversation. I wasn't even in business attire. Just a T-shirt," Young recalls. The colonel liked what he read enough to put the founders in touch with people at the lab, formally known as the US Army C5ISR Center. Desperate to show those folks that their concept would work, the founders built a night vision smartphone app. They put the smartphone into a smartphone-holding VR set. It was a rudimentary prototype that was impressive enough enough to lead to their first sale. "The army awarded us a $100,000 contract in February 2024, one month into Y Combinator, based on the proof of concept in a smartphone demo and our whitepapers and presentation," Young said. Young and Li then had to present their progress in a more formal demo. The pair flew to Washington D.C. to show a room packed with 10 people how their software worked as well as state-of-the-art goggles, Young said. (Here's a YouTube video where they demo their tech.) The meeting led to more contracts. A year after launching, the startup has booked about $4.6 million in contracts from the federal government, including the US Army and Air Force, as well as with companies like Sionyx and SRI International. Deepnight also promptly attracted investors. By the end of YC, it raised a $5.5 million round led by Initialized Capital, with angels like Kulveer Taggar, former In-Q-Tel partner Brian Shin, and Matthew Bellamy, lead singer of the band Muse. Y Combinator also chipped in their standard deal. Perhaps best of all, Koltun, the scientist who wrote the paper that inspired the company, also became an angel investor. Deepnight offers software and partners with hardware makers like goggle manufacturers or military helmets or other products. "Now we can make everything in the world see in the dark, because it's just a software program. So that's automotive, security, drones, maritime like boats, electronics, nav cameras," Young describes. And because it all relies on an off-the-shelf $50 smartphone camera, their tech doesn't need expensive bespoke hardware.

Deepnight Raises $5.5M To Disrupt Night Vision Industry Using AI

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Deepnight, the first and only company to use AI software for military night vision, announced today it raised $5.5M in funding. Led by Initialized Capital, additional participants include Y Combinator, renowned scientist Vladlen Koltun (co-author of Learning to See in the Dark), angel investor Kulveer Taggar, Brian Shin, a former partner at In-Q-Tel, and Matthew Bellamy, lead singer of the band Muse. Deepnight will use the funds to continue to develop its AI-based night vision technology and hire for key roles in computational imaging research. "What the Deepnight team has been able to accomplish using AI is truly revolutionary for night vision and will have broad implications for improving safety in low light environments, whether that's defense, agriculture, or environmental research," said Kim-Mai Cutler, Partner at Initialized Capital. "We are excited for Deepnight to advance its technology making digital night vision devices more affordable and accessible." Combining low-light cameras with a novel AI image processing algorithm, Deepnight achieves superior low-light imaging performance to existing military night vision created by industry incumbents like L3Harris. Right now, state of the art military night vision goggles cost around $13K because they use rare metals and bespoke manufacturing processes. The high cost is attributable to the highly precise manufacturing, as opposed to the mass manufactured CMOS sensors found in digital camera systems. Deepnight instead uses a digital approach: by leveraging the ubiquity of silicon manufacturing, in both sensors and AI chips, Deepnight will mass produce higher performing digital night vision goggles at a fraction of the cost of their analog counterparts. In less than a year, Deepnight has earned $4.6M in contracts with the federal government including the Air Force and the Army as well as with companies like Sionyx and SRI International. "We are thrilled to work with our investors, which include experts in the fundamental science that we use, to advance our AI model and replace analog night vision with digital cameras enabled by algorithms," said Lucas Young, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepnight. "This market was very overdue for a disruption and now with advances in AI we can deliver a complete night vision solution to these industries at a much more affordable price point." "What impressed me most about Deepnight is how they've fundamentally reimagined night vision technology," said Kulveer Taggar. "By combining AI with digital sensors, Lucas and his team aren't just drastically reducing costs, they're actually delivering superior performance to traditional systems. Securing millions of dollars in government and defense contracts in their first year demonstrates the clear market demand for this breakthrough approach." About Deepnight Deepnight is making advanced night vision accessible to everyone, transforming how the world sees after dark with groundbreaking AI-driven solutions. The company has disrupted the market with a digital approach and will mass produce higher performing digital night vision goggles at a fraction of the cost of their analog counterparts. Deepnight's customers currently include the Air Force, the Army and companies like Sionyx and SRI International. The company is backed by Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and prominent investors and is headquartered in San Francisco. To learn more visit http://deepnight.ai. Kerry Metzdorf Big Swing Communications 978-463-2575 kerry@big-swing.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9d8fcea9-8251-4470-a531-f8fa2bc17ff3 Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs