Matt Carey, co-founder and CEO of Boston-based startup Teradar, loves it when people say, “I can’t believe it.”
That’s “where we want you to be,” he recently told TechCrunch.
Carey has been quietly working for the past few years to build solid-state sensors that use the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, between microwaves and infrared radiation, to see the world. Essentially, it combines the best properties of radar sensors, such as the absence of moving parts and the ability to penetrate rain and fog, with the high resolution offered by laser-based LIDAR sensors.
This is a product that has never been done on this scale before, so it’s natural for people to be skeptical when Carey describes his work. An affordable long-range high-resolution sensor? It sounds too good to be true.
It’s usually at this point that Carey gives a demo, like last year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Outside the Westgate Hotel, Carey pointed an early version of his Teradar sensor at the crowd as representatives from a major automaker analyzed the scene in real time.
“They almost didn’t believe it until they played with it,” he says. “I’ve never spent a lot of time demonstrating when people raise money and trying to defeat it. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, right?”
Carey’s demo and the technology itself helped secure a $150 million Series B funding round from investors including Capricorn Investment Group, the venture arm of Lockheed Martin, mobility-focused firm IBEX Investors, and VXI Capital, a new defense-focused fund led by the former chief technology officer of the U.S. Army’s Defense Innovation Unit.
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Teradar claims it is already working with five top automakers in the U.S. and Europe to validate the technology and hopes to win contracts to install its sensors in 2028 model year vehicles. In other words, it needs to be ready for release in 2027. Teradar also works with three Tier 1 suppliers, which the company will rely on for manufacturing, he said.
Teradar’s near-term goal is for automakers to use its sensors to power advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving systems. The “modular terahertz engine,” as the sensor is officially known, could be customized for any of these applications, Carey said, and would be priced somewhere between radar and lidar. (Think hundreds of dollars, not thousands.)
“How do you put sensors in every vehicle? I have a Ford Focus, and there’s no chance I’ll put a $1,000 LIDAR in it,” Carey said.
Carey said he was inspired to start Teradar after a friend died in a car accident.
“This was one of those weird corner cases between sun and fog that existing sensors couldn’t solve,” he said. Cameras usually struggle in situations like this where there is a lot of glare. The fog will also pose a challenge for riders. And radar usually has low resolution, so it’s not very useful.
Carey was already negotiating a job with an automaker and was thinking about self-driving car technology. In 2021, he started talking about this glaring problem with his colleague Gregory Charvat, CTO of spatial sensors and intelligence company Humatics.
“[Charvat] Shortly after, MIT’s nonprofit incubator The Engine led a seed round and launched Teradar.
Teradar’s sensors may have other applications, including in the defense sector. There’s obviously some interest there based on who’s on the company’s cap table. Carey said the company is focused almost entirely on its automotive business at the moment.
Carey admits he is not the first to try to exploit the terahertz part of the spectrum. Numerous academic studies have been conducted so far, and there have been several attempts to commercialize this technology. However, many of them are focused on industrial and security applications.
He said recent advances in the silicon industry, combined with a focused team of experts, including third co-founder Nick Saiz, who Carey boasted is “without a doubt the best terahertz chip designer in the world,” have allowed the industry to move quickly and attract major automakers.
However, that doesn’t mean it was easy.
“It’s very difficult to get their attention, it’s very difficult to get their funding, it’s very difficult to get test track time,” he said. “The fact that they gave us all these capabilities means a lot.”
In other words, they now believe in him.
