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

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 aper ... Read full article.