DHI joins Rice University's 2026 Summer Venture Studio
DHI has been selected for the 2026 Summer Venture Studio at Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We are one of nine ventures in this year's cohort, and we are grateful, and a little impatient to get to work.
The short version: the Summer Venture Studio is a three-month, immersive program that backs each venture with non-dilutive capital, hands-on mentorship, workspace, and a network of founders, investors, and operators who have built real companies. Over half of past cohorts have gone on to raise pre-seed or seed rounds. That is the room we get to build in this summer.
We could write the usual announcement. Instead, here is what we actually plan to do with it.
What we came to prove
Most AI surveillance stories follow the same script. Rip out your cameras, buy the vendor's hardware, ship your footage to a cloud you don't control, and hope the model does what the demo promised.
We think that script is backwards.
DHI runs edge AI on the CCTV and video management systems organizations already own. No rip-and-replace. No forced hardware refresh. The analytics, more than 25 use cases across safety, compliance, and security, run on-premise, on the feeds you already have, with the footage staying where it belongs: with you.
The question was never whether the AI could see. It was who gets to keep what it sees, and who gets to turn it off.
That last part matters more than the industry likes to admit. When your inference runs in someone else's cloud, someone else decides when it works, what it costs next quarter, and what happens to your frames. We built DHI so that decision stays on-site, in your control.
The part people get wrong about us
We build the hard capabilities. Detection, recognition, the full stack of computer vision that modern safety and security work demands. We are not the vendor that abstains from the difficult problems and calls it ethics.
The difference is architecture, not appetite. Same capability as the cloud-first players. Opposite design. On-premise by default, data-minimizing by design, and yours to govern. Same capability. Opposite architecture. Opposite outcome.
That is the thesis we are bringing into the studio, and the one we intend to sharpen against real founders, real operators, and real deployment feedback over the next three months.
The cohort
We are in good company. The 2026 Summer Venture Studio cohort spans wearable smart fabrics for demanding environments, AI-driven healthcare intake and respiratory diagnostics, go-to-market engineering, computer-vision motion coaching, and reinforcement-learning simulation. Nine teams, all trying to turn a hard technical idea into a company that lasts.
To Kyle Judah and the Lilie team at Rice: thank you for the seat at the table. To everyone who has run a pilot with us, pushed back on a claim, or asked the uncomfortable question about where their video goes, you shaped what we are bringing here.
What is next
We will keep shipping. If you run cameras, in a warehouse, a hospital, a school, a plant, and you have ever wondered why the AI you were sold needs to phone home to be useful, that is exactly the assumption we are here to break.
Start with one camera that matters. We will show you the rest.