Deepnight, a San Francisco startup that does night vision with AI instead of image intensifier tubes, has won a US Army Other Transaction Agreement to bring the same approach to thermal sensing. The award sits under the Army’s Delivering Unmatched Thermal Capability Hastened program, DUTCH for short. The value wasn’t disclosed.
The target is cost. Good thermal sensors run several thousand dollars apiece, which is fine for a tank sight and absurd for a drone that may not come back.
Software instead of glass
Conventional night vision amplifies light through an image intensifier tube, an expensive analog part with a small supplier base. Deepnight uses ordinary digital image sensors and runs neural network processing on the output to pull a usable picture from very little light. The company was founded by engineers and AI researchers from smartphone computational photography teams, the same people who made phone cameras good in the dark. It won the Army’s xTech Search 9 competition in 2025 and has raised $14 million.
The OTA extends that to thermal. Deepnight will pair its image processing with lower-cost thermal sensor hardware and try to get close to the performance of much more expensive systems. CEO Lucas Young summed it up as “high-end performance without the high-end price tag.”
Why thermal and low-light together
The two sensors do different jobs. Thermal is very good at detection: a warm body in a treeline stands out at night or through light foliage. It’s weak at recognition, at telling what exactly you’re looking at. That’s where AI processing comes in. Deepnight says it wants to span several sensor types rather than build one-off products.
The drone angle is the one to watch. Ukraine has shown that cheap drones flown in large numbers matter more than a few expensive ones, and the Army is buying with that in mind. A thermal payload priced like a phone camera module instead of a targeting pod would change what it can afford to put on an expendable airframe.
It’s early. Development is underway, and Deepnight and the Army are still setting test and performance milestones under DUTCH. An OTA is a prototype vehicle, not a production contract. But OTAs are also how the Army has been moving small companies into programs faster than the normal acquisition system allows. If the milestones land, the follow-on is where the real money is.