Brian Huppi helped invent the iPhone's touchscreen. Now he's trying to sell contractors something that sounds closer to science fiction: a device that peers through drywall from across a room and maps what's hiding inside—pipes, wires, studs, all of it—in under a minute.
The startup behind it, Applied Electrodynamics, emerged from Y Combinator's summer cohort with a founding team that includes Apple antenna engineers and Google Nest architects. Their product, WaveSight, is described as a portable imaging system that fires radio waves through common building materials and returns readable data about what lies beneath. Not thermal gradients. Not surface bounces. Actual through-wall imagery, they say, that doesn't require a specialist to interpret.
Whether that claim holds up under jobsite conditions is the $883 million question—roughly the size analysts expect the ground-penetrating radar market to reach by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights. Construction, notoriously resistant to new tech until it isn't, has lately been warming to reality capture tools. A BuiltWorlds report from June found that 58% of surveyed construction organizations now deploy some form of reality capture on most projects, with drones, 360-degree cameras, and LiDAR rapidly becoming standard kit. The issue is whether through-wall imaging becomes the next layer in that stack or gets trapped in a regulatory and adoption thicket.
Consumer Hardware Chops Meet Industrial Reality
Applied Electrodynamics lists four co-founders, though two carry the most verifiable pedigree. Huppi is a named inventor on Apple's "Multipoint Touchscreen" patent—the one filed in May 2004 and issued six years later, a foundational piece of iPhone multi-touch technology that got cited extensively when Apple and Samsung went to war in court. He also holds multiple Nest thermostat patents from the Google era, covering occupancy sensing architectures that later became standard in smart home devices.
Paul Leutheuser, another co-founder, shows up on several Apple hardware patents spanning antenna designs, housing structures, and display reinforcement, filed between 2021 and 2026. The company's website claims "250+ patents" across the team, though individual attribution beyond these two remains murky in public records. George McLean and Matt Egan round out the founding roster but lack the same patent trail, at least as of late July.
The narrative matters because consumer electronics at Apple's scale demands solving imaging, signal processing, and user experience puzzles under punishing size and power constraints. If that discipline translates to industrial hardware, WaveSight could leapfrog clunky existing solutions. If it doesn't—well, branding has a way of outpacing product, particularly in hardware.
A Market That's Neither Empty Nor Simple
Applied Electrodynamics isn't exactly breaking new ground. Ground-penetrating radar has been scanning concrete and subsurface utilities for years. Fortune Business Insights pegged the GPR market at $492 million in 2026, projecting a 7.6% compound annual growth rate through 2034. Leica Geosystems, Screening Eagle, GSSI—these vendors already offer handheld and cart-based systems that plug into cloud workflows and Building Information Modeling platforms.
Closer to WaveSight's positioning sits Walabot DIY 2, made by Vayyar, a consumer-grade in-wall radar that detects studs, pipes, and wires. It works with iOS and Android, offers an "Expert Mode" for raw radar data, and has been available at retail since March. On the heavier end, Camero-Tech's Xaver series—designed for military, law enforcement, and disaster response—can detect human presence through walls at ranges exceeding 100 meters. Those devices saw deployment in earthquake zones from Mexico in 2017 to Turkey's catastrophic quakes in 2023.
Then there's the regulatory labyrinth. FCC rule §15.510 restricts ultra-wideband "through-wall imaging systems" to public safety users who hold Part 90 licenses, complete with specific emission limits and labeling requirements. If WaveSight relies on sub-10 GHz UWB technology and falls under that classification, direct sales to general contractors would be prohibited outright. Alternative pathways exist—the FCC authorized 60 GHz fixed and mobile sensing devices under §15.255 following a July 2023 rule change—but those higher frequencies penetrate materials less effectively than lower bands. A fundamental physics problem.
As of late July, when the company opened its preorder interest form, Applied Electrodynamics had not disclosed its RF specifications, authorization pathway, or FCC equipment ID. Perhaps those details are being saved for Y Combinator's Demo Day. Or perhaps the company is still navigating the regulatory maze.
The BIM Bet
What might distinguish WaveSight—assuming it clears the technical and legal hurdles—is integration with Building Information Modeling workflows. The company's website claims to offer the "missing link" to BIM, a phrase that sounds like marketing until you consider what's already happening in construction tech.
Reality capture tools like OpenSpace, which announced general availability of its Field product in early February, already bring AI-linked visual intelligence into jobsite workflows with integrations to Procore and Autodesk. Exodigo, a subsurface intelligence platform founded in 2021, raised a $96 million Series B in July 2025 and has been expanding its AI-driven mapping across utilities and transit projects.
If WaveSight can output data that aligns natively with IFC or Revit formats, it shifts from diagnostic device to validation and quality-control tool during construction—not just something you pull out when something's gone wrong. The catch is whether the imaging proves accurate enough and the output intuitive enough for non-experts. The site displays sample images labeled as "real"—studs, junction boxes, pipes behind drywall—but without independent testing or published specs on standoff distance, material penetration, and scan time, performance remains an open question. How does it stack up against GPR or ultrasonic alternatives? Hard to say.
What Happens Next
Applied Electrodynamics participated in demo events at Build Expo in Nashville and the BuiltWorlds ConTech Conference in Chicago earlier this summer, according to LinkedIn posts from team members. The company has a preorder interest form but no public pricing, no ship dates, no confirmed customer pilots—at least none disclosed as of late July. Y Combinator's Demo Day typically surfaces those details, so the coming weeks should clarify market positioning and early traction.
The broader trend is unmistakable: construction is normalizing visual intelligence and sensor fusion, even if adoption remains uneven. Trimble noted in a January blog post that the industry expects agentic AI to shift from pilots to production workflows, with reality capture "already invaluable" for precision, safety, and speed. Wi-Fi sensing, formalized under the IEEE 802.11bf standard published in late 2025, will bring coarse through-materials presence detection to consumer routers by decade's end, familiarizing a wider user base with RF sensing concepts—even if those systems won't deliver construction-grade imaging.
The question for Applied Electrodynamics isn't whether the market wants better ways to see what's hidden. It clearly does. Rework costs and buried infrastructure remain stubborn pain points, and anything that reduces surprises mid-project has obvious appeal. The question is whether WaveSight can navigate the regulatory constraints, hit the performance benchmarks, and integrate smoothly enough to become standard kit rather than a specialist tool relegated to edge cases.
The founding team's consumer hardware experience suggests they understand the bar for "just works" products—the kind that don't require manuals or training sessions. Whether they can clear that bar in an industrial context, with all its friction and skepticism, is the story worth watching. Because if they can, the construction industry might finally get comfortable with the idea of seeing through walls. And if they can't, well, the industry has seen plenty of overhyped hardware promises before.
