Tech Duo Stunned the Military With AI Night Vision That Beat $30,000 Goggles

For decades, night vision technology has remained largely unchanged, relying on expensive, analog systems that cost anywhere from $13,000 to $30,000 per unit. Despite ongoing efforts by the U.S. military to transition to digital alternatives, night vision remains a hardware problem, with defense contractors like L3Harris and Elbit America continuing to dominate the market with costly, legacy technology. However, a new approach—one that treats night vision as a software problem rather than a hardware one—may finally be shifting the landscape.

Deepnight, a startup founded by childhood friends Lucas Young and Thomas Li, is attempting to redefine digital night vision by leveraging AI and mass-produced smartphone cameras rather than proprietary military hardware. Both former software engineers at Google, Young and Li had spent years working on computational photography and computer vision, respectively. Young, who studied computational photography at Cal Poly, had experience developing software to compensate for the limitations of small smartphone cameras. Li, meanwhile, had a strong background in AI-driven image processing. Their combined expertise positioned them well to tackle the long-standing challenge of digital night vision.

The inspiration for Deepnight came from a 2018 scientific paper titled Learning to See in the Dark, co-authored by AI researcher Vladlen Koltun, now at Apple. The paper explored the potential of AI to enhance low-light imaging, but at the time, hardware limitations prevented real-time implementation. By 2024, Young realized that AI accelerators in modern system-on-chips (SoCs) had improved to the point where real-time, 90-frames-per-second (fps) night vision processing was feasible. Recognizing the opportunity, Young convinced Li to leave Google, and together they founded Deepnight. They were quickly accepted into Y Combinator’s winter cohort.

A Chance Encounter with the Military

While the military was an obvious customer for their technology, Young and Li had no direct way to pitch the Pentagon. Instead, Young attended an industry event where members of the U.S. Army’s night vision laboratory, formally known as the C5ISR Center, were present. He distributed copies of a white paper outlining their software-based approach. One of those papers landed in the hands of an army colonel who, intrigued by the idea, connected them with the right people at the lab.