Matt Carey, the co-founder and CEO of the Boston-based startup Teradarhe loves it when people tell him, “I don’t believe you.”
That’s “exactly where we want people,” he recently told TechCrunch.
Carey has spent the past few years quietly building a solid-state sensor that sees the world using the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which lies between microwaves and infrared. It essentially combines the best features of radar sensors – such as no moving parts and the ability to penetrate rain or fog – with the higher resolution provided by laser-based lidar sensors.
It’s a product that’s never been created on 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 last 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 representatives from some of the biggest car companies watched him analyze 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 on a show of people trying to break it. And that’s the way it should be, right?”
Carey’s demonstrations — and the technology itself — helped him close a $150 million Series B funding round from investors including Capricorn Investment Group, Lockheed Martin’s venture arm, mobility-focused firm Ibex Investors and VXI Capital. new defense-focused fund led by the former CTO of the US military’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Teradar claims it is already working with five leading automakers from the US and Europe to validate the technology and expects to win a contract to put the company’s sensors in a 2028 model year vehicle — meaning it should be ready to go in 2027. Teradar is also working with three Tier 1 suppliers, which it said the company will rely on to manuf.
Teradar’s short-term goal is for automakers to use its sensors to power advanced driver assistance systems and even self-driving systems. The “modular terahertz motor,” as the sensor is officially known, can be customized to fit any of these applications, and Carey said the price will fall somewhere between a radar and a lidar. (Think a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand.)
“How do we get the sensor in every vehicle? I drive a Ford Focus, and there’s no way you can put a $1,000 lidar” on it, Carey said.
Carey said he was inspired to start Teradar after a friend died in a car accident.
“It was one of those weird corner cases where, between the sun and the fog, it couldn’t be solved by any existing sensor,” he said. In such a situation, where there is a lot of glare, cameras usually struggle. Lidar will also be challenged due to fog. And radar can only help so much with its usually lower resolution.
Carey had already discussed going to work at an automaker and was thinking about autonomous vehicle technology. In 2021, he started talking to his colleague Gregory Charvat, the CTO of the spatial sensors and information company Humatics, about this apparent problem.
“[Charvat] it was like, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to be able to image in terahertz,'” Carey said. Shortly thereafter, they launched Teradar, with MIT’s nonprofit incubator The Engine leading the production cycle.
There could be other applications for Teradar’s sensor, such as in the defense sector. There’s clearly interest there based on who’s at the company’s capital table. For now, Carey said the company is almost entirely focused on the automotive industry.
Carey admits he’s not the first to try to tap into the terahertz portion of the spectrum. There has been a litany of academic research and some attempts to commercialize the technology in the past. But a lot of it has centered around industrial or safety applications.
He said recent advances in the silicon industry combined with a focused team of experts — including third co-founder Nick Saiz, whom Carey boasted is “the best terahertz chip designer in the world, bar none” — 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, and it’s very hard to get their trial time,” he said. “The fact that they’ve unlocked all these things for us means a big deal.”
In other words: Now they believe him.
