Look Dynamics brings speed to optical imaging for less cash

LONGMONT — Faster and better are words that often reside at the core of business success.

And it’s not likely you’d get any arguments from Look Dynamics on that theory. That’s because the Longmont-based startup has created an optical image engine that takes in digital files and sends the image through an optical module at more than 1,000 images per second.

“It’s an optical super-computer,´ said David Bruce, one of the company’s founders. “We make images usable and we give images shape.”

And it does those tasks very fast.

Bruce said it’s “hundreds of times faster” than previous computers. So now what used to be economically unfeasible is now feasible.

According to Bruce, there are many companies out there that can process some images, but customers have found that the current technology just isn’t economical in many instances.

“What those other companies do is very general. What we do is very specific,” he said.

And that specificity is what Bruce expects to cause Look Dynamics to take over and satisfy those other customers’ needs.

The primary market right now is the Earth imaging sector. But other large data center customers such as AT&T or IBM also could become customers.

The company, which Bruce started in 1998, has spent much, if not all, of its last four years preparing for showing its wares to customers. “We’re just now getting out and showing potential customers what we have,” he said. Generally speed is the thing.

The two ways the company plans to make money is to either sell by the processed image or lease the equipment it has created to customers.

In addition to having a better and faster product, it doesn’t hurt to have a large market. That also appears to be the case with Look Dynamics. “We have a lot of large potential customers,´ said Bruce.

But he is tight-lipped for now on exactly who some of those potential customers are.

“I’ve signed a lot of NDA (non-disclosure agreements) and other documents that forbid me to talk about clients,´ said Bruce. “I can say there are some who have big applications — those who take in information by satellite.”

Suffice it to say, some would speculate that the government — particularly defense and intelligence communities — would enjoy being able to better appreciate information it has. Look Dynamics could likely play a key role in processing that information.

Many companies would give up their water coolers to have a large, lucrative government contract. But apparently the company’s customer base doesn’t stop at the government.

“There are a lot of commercial applications, too — big companies out there that need help processing huge volumes of images,” he said. “Biomedical text, engineering video, Earth imaging, photos, large archives of images.”

Rikk Krill, Look Dynamics’ co-founder, and Bruce both have experience in image processing and industrial high-speed machine visioning.

Bruce wouldn’t say how many employees the company has or how much money it has had to sink into the company’s development. He did say it was funded with each of the founders’ money and some private investments, but no venture capital.

The company, which was previously based in Boulder, intentionally stayed in Boulder County and moved to Longmont about 18 months ago.

“We needed more space,” he said. “But Boulder County, in general, is a great area for optical companies. There are good suppliers, and it’s a good place to find employees within the industry, too. I’d say it’s one of the top areas in the country for this kind of work.”

Bruce said the optics industry has garnered a lot of attention over the last 20 years.

“A lot of people doing optical storage,” he said. “What we’re doing is just one tiny segment of the overall optical industry.”

Lately the market has punished optics. Producers such as Corning Glass have overextended themselves. Qwest laid down a lot of fiber-optics. The telecoms such as AT&T just went too far.

“They’ll come back, and we’ll be one those companies’ customers,” Bruce said.

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