WAKEFIELD, Mass.--Less than six months after landing a $500,000 grant and the title of "world's most promising security technology start-up" by winning the Global Security Challenge, NoblePeak Vision continued its momentum with two awards in SIA's New Product Showcase at ISC West. NoblePeak's TriWave night vision technology won both the Video Devices category and the Best of NPS Innovation Award as the top product among the 16 category winners.

In between these two wins, the company also hired a new chief executive officer, Mike Decelle, who has experience with a number of optical technology start-ups, and secured $12 million in Series B funding led by Chart Venture Partners.

"This is real validation," said NoblePeak senior marketing manager Stephen Germino of the NPS win. "It's opened the eyes of a lot of people, the integrators and the OEMs."

That validation has been necessary because of the "newness" of the company's technology. NoblePeak makes a "Germanium-enhanced, CMOS imager and delivers unparalleled sensitivity and resolution across the visible, near-infrared and short-wave infrared spectrum." According to NoblePeak, its imager sees wavelengths that are beyond what low-light cameras can see and, therefore, "illumination from Earth's natural night glow is now visible and can be utilized to build a new generation of high-performance, commercially viable day/night cameras."

Night glow? "A lot of people don't even know about this night glow," NoblePeak vice president of marketing Phil Davies acknowledged. "They don't even know there's a light source there that lights up the Earth at night, and that you can rely on it. So with the Web and conventions we're gaining access to the end users and integrators, educating them about the short wave infrared, that it's a tremendous light source, and that the U.S. military is chasing this light sources, which shows how good it is."

Davies said to look for the first commercially available cameras with the TriWave imaging technology to be available later this year, coming from a smaller camera manufacturer. The bigger camera makers should have the technology integrated by quarter three of 2009. "For this technology to be really mainstream and prevalent as an option," Davis predicted, "it's probably another year and a half."