This beautiful $300 security camera can recognize faces and keep track of your kids — and it's backed by some of the biggest names in tech

• The Lighthouse security camera is a $300 internet-connected device that can identify you and your family members.
• The camera can do things like alert you when there are intruders in your home, or tell you if the dog walker came. 
• Lighthouse is backed by tech execs like Sebastian Thrun, and is part of tech incubator Playground Global. 

Hardware startup Lighthouse had a straightforward goal with its first-ever product: make a home security camera that's smarter than anything else on the market.  

The result is the Lighthouse camera, which costs $300 and is available to buy online and on Amazon. It's an artificially intelligent, internet-connected security camera. It can identify you and your family members, alert you when there are intruders in your home, and understand commands like, "Did the dog walker come today?"

Lighthouse is entering an already-crowded field of smart security cameras. But its built-in AI, along with the backing of prominent tech execs like Sebastian Thrun, make the Lighthouse camera an exciting entry. 

Here's how it works:

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Lighthouse was founded in 2014 by Hendrik Dahlkamp and Alex Teichman, who met while working in Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun's lab at Stanford University. Lighthouse later joined Playground Global, an incubator run by Android creator Andy Rubin.

The Lighthouse camera is the startup's first product. When building it, Lighthouse wanted to "take a traditional camera and give it the eyes of a self-driving car, and give it the natural language understanding of a Google Assistant," Teichman told Business Insider.

Teichman described traditional security cameras versus the Lighthouse camera as "going from VCR to TiVo."