Teradar raises $150 million for a sensor it says is superior to lidar and radar

Matt Carey, co-founder and CEO of a Boston-based startup Tiradar He likes when people tell him: “I don’t believe you.”

“This is exactly where we want it,” he recently told TechCrunch.

Curry has quietly spent the past few years building a solid-state sensor that sees the world using the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which falls between microwaves and infrared. It essentially combines the best attributes of radar sensors — such as no moving parts and the ability to penetrate rain or fog — with the high resolution offered by laser-based lidar sensors.

It’s a product that’s never been done on this scale before, so people are understandably skeptical when Curry explains his work. A long-range, high-precision sensor that’s also affordable? It sounds too good to be true.

Carey usually gives them a demo at this point, as happened at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There was Curry, outside the Westgate Hotel, pointing an early version of a Teradar sensor at crowds of people while representatives from some of the biggest automakers watched him analyze the scene in real time.

“They almost couldn’t believe it until they played with it,” he said. “I’ve never raised money without spending a lot of time demoing it to people trying to break it. That’s how it should be, right?”

Carey’s demos — and the technology itself — helped him secure a $150 million Series B funding round from investors like Capricorn Investment Group, the venture arm of Lockheed Martin, mobility-focused IBEX Investors, and VXI Capital, a New fund focuses on defence Led by the former technical director of the US Army’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Teradar claims it is already working with five major automakers from the US and Europe to validate the technology, and expects to win a contract to put the company’s sensors into a 2028 model year car – meaning they will need to be ready for launch in 2027. Teradar is also working with three tier one suppliers, which it said the company will rely on for manufacturing.

Teradar’s near-term goal is for automakers to use its sensors to power advanced driver assistance systems and even self-driving systems. The “modular terahertz engine,” as the sensor is officially known, can be customized to fit any of these applications, and Carey said the price will fall somewhere between radar and lidar. (Think a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.)

“How do we put the sensor in each individual vehicle? I drive a Ford Focus, and there’s no way we could put a $1,000 lidar on that,” Curry said.

Carey said he was inspired to start Teradar after a friend of his died in a car accident.

“It was one of those strange cases, between the sun and the fog, that couldn’t be solved by any existing sensor,” he said. In such a situation, where there is a lot of glare, cameras usually face difficulties. Lidar will also be challenged by fog. Radar can only help so much with its typically low accuracy.

Curry had already been in talks to go work for an automaker, and was considering self-driving vehicle technology. In 2021, he started talking to colleague Gregory Charvat, CTO at spatial sensing and intelligence company Humatics, about this apparent problem.

“(Charvat) was like, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to be able to shoot in terahertz,'” Carey said. Soon after, they started Teradar, with MIT’s non-profit incubator The Engine leading their seed round.

There could be other applications for the Terradar sensor, such as in the defense sector. There’s clearly interest based on who’s on the company’s cap table. For now, Carey said the company is focused almost entirely on the automotive business.

Carey admits he’s not the first to try to take advantage of the terahertz part of the spectrum; There have been a series of academic research, and some attempts to commercialize the technology before. But a lot of that has been focused on industrial or protection Applications.

He said recent developments in the silicon industry combined with a dedicated team of experts — including his third co-founder Nick Saiz, who Carey boasted was “the best designer of terahertz chips in the world, ever” — allowed them to move quickly and attract major automakers.

That doesn’t mean it was easy, though.

“It’s very hard to get their attention, it’s very hard to get their dollars, it’s very hard to get their testing time,” he said. “The fact that they opened up all these things to us means a lot.”

In other words: now believe him.