Capability · Computer Vision
Computer Vision Got a New Stack
Promptable segmentation, vision-language models, and real-time detectors changed what's buildable - and what it costs. Here's the landscape as we see it from production.
Trusted by 100+ founders
What Changed
From Label Factories to Foundation Models
3 shifts that rewrote the economics of shipping vision systems.
Then
Months of Labels Before First Results
Vision used to start with data collection: thousands of labeled images, weeks of training, one narrow model per task - and retraining every time the camera moved.
2023-24
Foundation Models Ate the Pipeline
Promptable segmentation (SAM) and open-vocabulary detection collapsed label budgets. Suddenly you could point at 'the container' with words, not 10,000 boxes.
Now
VLMs Read Scenes Like Analysts
Vision-language models answer questions about images directly - damage assessment, document extraction, compliance checks - and hand off to fast specialist models where latency matters.
The Build Spectrum
3 Ways to Ship Vision in 2026
Prompt an API, adapt open weights, or train a specialist - the right answer depends on latency, volume, and how wrong you can afford to be.
The Landscape
What Each Class of Model Is Actually For
The tools are public. Knowing which one carries which job is the craft.
Vision-Language Models
GPT-5 Vision · Gemini · Qwen-VL
Scene understanding, VQA, extraction from documents and photos. The fastest path from question to answer.
Promptable Segmentation
SAM 3 · video propagation
Pixel-precise masks from a click or a phrase - and it tracks through video. Label budgets fell an order of magnitude.
Open-Vocabulary Detection
Grounding DINO · OWL-ViT
Detect objects described in plain language, no training run required. The prototyping default.
Real-Time Detectors
YOLO family · RT-DETR
When 30fps on a gate camera is the requirement, distilled specialist models still win. Milliseconds, not seconds.
OCR & Documents
container IDs · forms · plates
The unglamorous workhorse - reading structured text off the physical world, reliably, at production volume.
Edge Deployment
TensorRT · CoreML · ONNX
Quantized models on cameras and gateways: no round trip to the cloud, no bandwidth bill, no privacy leak.
Where We Come In
We've Shipped This at the Largest Port in the US
A system that watches camera feeds of shipping containers entering the largest US port and classifies which get automatic entry - running on live gate cameras, with low-confidence frames always routed to a human.
Our vision work is eval-driven model selection across this whole spectrum, the data pipelines behind it, and deployment where it has to run - cloud or edge.
Read the case study- Live gate-camera feeds
- 24/7
- US port by tonnage
- #1
- Per-frame inference
- <50ms
- Low-confidence frames to humans
- 100%
Live gate-camera feeds
US port by tonnage
Per-frame inference
Low-confidence frames to humans
The Team Behind It
You Get Engineers, Not Tickets
100+ full-time product people - engineers, designers, PMs, and QA - led by founders who've built, scaled and exited their own startups. Senior people are on your product from day 1, working your hours. This is the same team watching the gates at the largest US port.
Meet the team
Rahul Nair
Co-Founder & Head of Engineering
Architect behind every AI system we ship to production.
+100Full-time team · 0 freelancers · US-hours overlap
Testimonials
Founders on Working With Tequity
Pre-Seed to Series B
“We hired Tequity shortly after closing our pre-seed, and since then they've completely taken over our frontend and DevOps work. Typical turnaround is 1 day for critical bug fixes, 7 days for new features, and 6 weeks for entire MVPs. The software we built together is now used by multiple leading American biopharma companies. I recommend Tequity for any startup from angel round through Series B and beyond.”
Founder & CTO, TerraFlow
“The best outsourced engineering help you can get. Genuinely talented engineers who deliver on time, take full ownership of the product, and push back on your ideas until they understand why you're building each thing.”
Founder, Bantor
4.9/5
Average rating across 100+ customers over 4 years
“They helped us audit our product, identify key UX/UI improvement opportunities, and prioritize quick wins that delivered immediate value. The team has been responsive, collaborative, and consistently delivers high-quality work.”
Founder & CEO, Boxsy
The work behind the words.
See all case studies →
Co-Founder, QuantWheel
“We came in expecting a redesign and got something more useful. Design Labs built us a design system our AI could actually build against, so what we ship stays consistent without us having to think about it. We'd give feedback and see it reflected in the next round, often the same day.”
LET'S TALK
Have Cameras Watching Something That Matters?
Book a 30-minute call. We'll tell you which part of the spectrum your problem lives on - and what it takes to ship it.