Matt Carey, the co-founder and CEO of Boston-based startup Teradar loves when people tell him: “I don’t believe you.”
That’s “right where we want folks,” he recently told TechCrunch.
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 pierce rain or fog — with the higher definition afforded by laser-based lidar sensors.
It’s a product that’s never been done at this scale before, so people are understandably skeptical when Carey explains his work. A long-range, high-resolution sensor that’s also affordable? It just sounds too good to be true.
It’s usually at this point that Carey gives them a demo, like at this past year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There was Carey, outside the Westgate hotel, aiming an early version of the Teradar sensor at crowds of people as reps from some of the biggest automakers watched it parse the scene in real time.
“They almost didn’t believe it until they got to play with it,” he said. “I’ve never raised money without, like, spending a lot of time in a demo of people trying to break it. And that’s how it should be, right?”
Carey’s demos — and the tech itself — helped him lock down a $150 million Series B funding round from investors like 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.
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
Teradar claims to already be working with five top automakers from the U.S. and Europe to validate the tech, and expects to win a contract to put the company’s sensors in a 2028-model vehicle — meaning it will need to be ready to go in 2027. Teradar is also working with three Tier 1 suppliers, which he said 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, and Carey said the price will fall somewhere between a radar and a lidar. (Think a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.)
... continue reading