Matt Carey, the co-founder and CEO of Boston-based startup Teradar, loves when people tell him they do not believe him. He says that is exactly where he wants people to be. Carey has spent the last few years quietly building a solid-state sensor that sees the world using the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which sits between microwaves and infrared. It essentially combines the best traits of radar sensors, like no moving parts and the ability to see through rain or fog, with the high definition afforded by laser-based lidar sensors.
This is a product that has never been done at this scale before, so people are understandably skeptical when Carey explains his work. A long-range, high-resolution sensor that is also affordable sounds too good to be true. Carey often gives them a demonstration, like at this past year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Outside the Westgate hotel, he aimed an early version of the Teradar sensor at crowds of people while representatives from some of the biggest automakers watched it parse the scene in real time. He said they almost did not believe it until they got to play with it. Carey stated he has never raised money without spending a lot of time in a demo where people try to break the technology, and he believes that is how it should be.
Carey’s demonstrations and the technology itself helped secure a one hundred fifty million dollar Series B funding round from investors including Capricorn Investment Group, Lockheed Martin’s venture arm, mobility-focused firm IBEX Investors, and VXI Capital, a new defense-focused fund led by the former CTO of the U.S. military’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Teradar claims to already be working with five top automakers from the U.S. and Europe to validate the technology, and expects to win a contract to put its sensors in a 2028-model vehicle. This means the sensors will need to be ready by 2027. Teradar is also working with three Tier 1 suppliers, which the company will lean on for manufacturing.
The near-term goal for Teradar is for automakers to use its sensors to power advanced driver assistance and even self-driving systems. The modular terahertz engine, as the sensor is officially known, can be customized to fit any of those applications. Carey said the price will fall somewhere between a radar and a lidar, meaning a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. He explained that the goal is to get the sensor on every single vehicle, noting that there is zero chance of putting a one thousand dollar lidar on a car like his Ford Focus.
Carey was inspired to start Teradar after a friend died in a car crash. It was a strange corner case where, between the sun and the fog, the accident could not have been solved by any existing sensor. In such a situation, with lots of glare, cameras typically struggle. Lidar would also be challenged by the fog, and radar can only help so much with its typically lower resolution. Carey had already been in talks to work for an automaker and was thinking about autonomous vehicle tech. In 2021, he started talking to his co-worker Gregory Charvat, the CTO of spatial sensor and intelligence company Humatics, about this problem. Charvat said he had always wanted to be able to image at terahertz. Shortly after, they started Teradar, with MIT’s The Engine nonprofit incubator leading its seed round.
There could be other applications for Teradar’s sensor, such as in the defense sector, and there is clear interest based on the company’s investors. For now, Carey said the company is almost entirely focused on the automotive business.
Carey admits he is not the first to try to leverage the terahertz part of the spectrum. There has been a litany of academic research and some previous attempts to commercialize the technology, but a lot of that was focused on industrial or security applications. He said recent advancements in the silicon industry, combined with a focused team of experts including his third co-founder Nick Saiz, whom Carey called the world’s best terahertz chip designer, have allowed them to move quickly and attract big automakers.
That does not mean it has been easy. Carey said it is very difficult to get the attention of automakers, it is very difficult to get their dollars, and it is very difficult to get time on their test tracks. The fact that they have unlocked all of those things for Teradar means a great deal. In other words, now they believe him.