Here's the pitch deck Deepnight used to raise $5.5 million in funding to make military night goggles cheaper with AI

Lakshmi Varanasi

Sat, Mar 8, 2025, 2:42 AM 4 min read

• Deepnight raises $5.5M to revolutionize subject nighttime imaginativeness with AI technology.

• It claims existent nighttime imaginativeness relies connected outdated hardware, limiting its effectiveness and cost.

• Night imaginativeness goggles are inactive "esoteric hardware," Deepnight's cofounder told BI.

AI is rapidly changing the look of subject technology, enabling innovations similar autonomous drones and software for managing tract logistics.

One country that inactive remains outdated, however, is military nighttime vision — a captious capableness for navigating covert operations, reconnaissance, and targeting adversaries.

A startup tackling the occupation done AI has caught the attraction of notable investors.

Deepnight made a splash past week by announcing it had raised $5.5 cardinal successful funding. The circular was led by Initialized Capital, with information from Y Combinator, Vladlen Koltun — a machine idiosyncratic who coauthored "Learning to See successful the Dark," a seminal insubstantial connected utilizing AI for low-light imaging — angel capitalist Kulveer Taggar, Brian Shin, a erstwhile spouse astatine the CIA's task superior limb In-Q-Tel, and Matthew Bellamy, pb vocalist of the set Muse. The institution has besides landed $4.6 cardinal successful contracts from the US Army, Air Force, and backstage assemblage companies Sionyx and SRI International.

Deepnight's innovation combines low-light cameras with a caller AI representation processing exemplary that improves low-light imagery and tin tally connected conscionable a smartphone. The institution plans to usage its exertion to wide nutrient higher-performance digital nighttime imaginativeness goggles astatine a fraction of the outgo of existent technology.

Google alums Lucas Young and Thomas Li launched the institution done Y Combinator successful 2023. The founders are puerility friends from New Jersey who stayed successful interaction arsenic they attended assemblage successful California. Young went to Cal Polytechnic State University, wherever helium specialized successful machine vision, and went connected to probe machine imaginativeness problems astatine Meta and Google. Li went to the University of California, Berkeley, studied electrical engineering and machine science, and worked connected instrumentality learning systems astatine Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lyft, and Google.

The US Army began utilizing nighttime imaginativeness during the Vietnam War successful the signifier of "starlight" scopes. These 6 lb. scopes were bulky, hard to use, and relied solely connected ambient airy and basal hardware to heighten the ocular opposition of images. The exertion has progressed since then, but incumbents similar L3Harris inactive trust connected hardware similar representation intensifiers to person disposable airy into electrons, amplify them, and past person them backmost into disposable airy to amended images.