Airborne missions generate vast amounts of data, but the real challenge lies in turning that raw input into real-time, actionable intelligence.
Since 2016, Overwatch Imaging has tackled this problem head-on and now supports mission-critical operations for wildfire, maritime, and defense/government-led missions on six continents.
From the company’s early days to the future of sensor autonomy, founder and CEO Greg Davis shares his story about the grit required to build a deep-tech success.
What was the original spark that led you to found Overwatch Imaging?
Overwatch Imaging was founded to bring AI-enabled autonomy to imagery intelligence systems used on time-critical missions. My goal was to make sensor intelligence scalable, eliminating the one-to-one crew dependency observed in overseas military operations.
Sensor autonomy represented the next significant evolution, enabling better intelligence for a wider range of uses and giving responders more time and options on the front lines.
How did you scale without early venture capital?
When Overwatch Imaging started in 2016, venture capital wasn’t readily available to aerospace and defense startups. As a bootstrapped team, our approach was to deploy quickly on real missions, listen to customers, continually improve, and demonstrate real results.
We were actively deployed within months of starting the company. This meant that we had to put our technology to the test right away, in the real world.
We couldn’t just pitch the technology; we had to prove it in real-world situations. That led to significant challenges, but it also kept us focused on building for the customer: not just creating technology for its own sake or chasing investor dollars.
Today, we are proud to say that we are proven, deployed, and mission-ready. While we have since received venture capital investment, our relentless focus on customer delivery remains unchanged.
How does “superhuman vision” relate to your ASO software?
Superhuman vision has a significant impact on wildfire response, making it an early and durable use case for our ASO (Automated Sensor Operator) software. As a wildfire burns on the ground, planes equipped with sensors fly overhead to provide eyes on the fire itself and direct the response.
The sensor can spot a tiny new fire ignited by a lightning strike or a campfire reignition before any smoke is visible. It detects hotspots too small for people to see, sees through smoke, operates in the dark, and generates a real-time digital map of the fire’s location.
In Oregon, Overwatch Imaging had sensors over the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, the 2020 Labor Day fires, and basically all major fires in the region over the past several years. Superhuman vision enabled responders to identify fire growth outside fire lines, keeping crews safer. Real-time intelligence enabled optimized community evacuations and ensured resources were deployed at the right time and place.
➔ Watch ASO 12.0 Software Release Webinar
What does your tagline “finding the needle in the haystack” mean?
Beyond wildfires, the same sensor autonomy principles apply to maritime missions. The goal is to find small boats in a vast ocean. This requires searching a wide area, detecting a tiny vessel against a vast blue backdrop, and dealing with the constant motion and environmental hazards of open water.
A major challenge for traditional imaging systems is the “soda straw effect,” where zooming in narrows the observable field of view. Searching over a wide area requires an operator to constantly adjust the sensor and review image after image of raw data.
Operating sensors is just one of many duties assigned to human crew members, making the workload overwhelming. As a result, sensors may go unused, or critical objects might not be found in time.
ASO software eliminates all of those tradeoffs. AI-enabled workflows steer the sensor, scan wide areas quickly and optimally, decide when to zoom in, navigate through the weather, and process all of the data as it is being collected.
When the boat is found, intelligence is delivered to the crew onboard the aircraft. Instead of performing repetitive, time-consuming sensor operations, crew members can use the sensor’s intelligence to determine the next actions needed to complete the mission.
What have you learned about navigating procurement and building trust with customers?
Often the question of adopting hardware-based technology is seen as a binary choice: Do we keep or replace? In government, that raises the question of whether replacement is worth a years-long cycle of requirements, acquisition, and budgetary approval.
Our ASO software is designed to provide a third option: keep and upgrade. Instead of replacing sensors, we are deploying software that brings autonomy to the existing hardware. That means the government can field innovative capabilities today.
In recent months, we have been encouraged to see the federal government take steps to work with more innovative private-sector businesses and adopt acquisition reforms aimed at speeding capability delivery. We believe the government, and by extension the public, will benefit from adopting more agile approaches to technology integration.
Our team feels incredibly proud to contribute to these defense and government-led missions, where communities and lives are often on the line. The sales environment is definitely tricky, but the massive impact enabled by operating in these markets is very rewarding.
Where do you see sensor autonomy heading in the next five years?
I’m a true believer that AI and autonomy enable systems to perform many mission-critical tasks better, more safely, and faster than humans can.
One of the great things about AI is that it continuously improves. So, as we continue to automate sensor operations, we can deploy more sensors more effectively in more places, bringing better outcomes to response teams, keeping communities and responders safer, and improving the world.
As we’ve gained experience deploying ASO, we now see that sensor autonomy can be applied to other sensor types, and that’s an area we are excited to tackle next.
We started with image-based sensors, but we are working to bring sensor autonomy to every type of sensor on everything that flies, and we continue to expand into other domains.
How have mentorship and networking helped you as an entrepreneur?
Building a company, a technology, a product, and a market concurrently is really hard. Having access to mentors, advisors, and invested stakeholders who have been there before and have skin in the game is incredibly valuable. Elevate Capital is truly a force for entrepreneurship in Portland, and we’re grateful.
The Gorge Technology Alliance, the Technology Association of Oregon, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, AUVSI and its Cascade Chapter, and other local organizations have also been incredibly helpful in providing advice and guidance, as well as introductions to potential customers, partners, new employees, and more.
What advice would you give to a founder who wants to build a deep-tech company?
It’s hard to argue with Jensen Huang, co-founder of Nvidia, on the topic of founding a deep-tech company. I really appreciated the honesty of Huang’s comments on this very question in 2023, in which he said:
“If we realized the pain and suffering [involved] and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong—I don’t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.”
If you are willing to push past those initial hurdles, you must be 100% committed to your mission. You need a deep, unshakeable belief that your technology is essential and that your company is the right one to build it.
Most importantly, you have to be the chief cheerleader and visionary, but also the manager, the bill payer, and the first to arrive and last to leave for many years.
➔ Learn more about Overwatch Imaging
➔ Follow Greg Davis on LinkedIn
Overwatch Imaging is a portfolio company funded through the Oregon SSBCI Venture Direct Program, which is managed by Elevate Capital. Photos provided by Overwatch Imaging.
