A father-son garage project spent nearly two decades turning telescope logic into a portable ultrasound system. The first serious proof is in, but the most interesting claims still have to survive larger clinical trials.
A 58-person shop in upstate New York builds software-defined radar - and just landed on a defense contract worth up to $151 billion.
Distributed Spectrum builds AI-powered radio-frequency sensors and software that automatically detect, classify, and locate signals - drones, jammers, tactical radios, GPS spoofers - in real time. Founded by three Harvard engineers, the company packs commercial hardware and edge AI into sub-one-pound sensors that give soldiers and analysts persistent spectrum awareness without specialist RF expertise. It raised a $25M Series A in March 2025 and has fielded systems with US military branches and partners in Ukraine.
Cambridge Terahertz is an MIT spinout building a chip-based imaging system that combines the 3D vision of lidar with the see-through power of X-ray, but using human-safe terahertz waves at a thousandth the power of a cell phone. Shrunk from an airport-scale scanner into a palm-sized, two-pound device, its AI-powered sensors detect concealed weapons through clothing and bags, and can see inside sealed packages without opening them. Founded in 2023 by MIT PhD Nathan Monroe, the company raised a $12M seed round led by Felicis with participation from Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund.
SpeakIn Technologies is a voiceprint-recognition and identity-security company founded in Silicon Valley in 2015 and headquartered in Shenzhen. Using deep neural networks and its iVector engine, SpeakIn turns the unique physical signature of a human voice into a biometric key, offering both 1:1 verification (is this the right speaker?) and 1:N identification (who is speaking, out of many?). Its SDK and cloud APIs are used across banking, public security, and smart devices, with reported accuracy near 98% and customers including Tencent, Lenovo, ASUS, and China Merchants Bank.
Pleno Inc. is a San Diego multi-omic instrument company rebuilding the economics of biological target detection. Its RAPTOR platform, powered by proprietary Hypercoding technology borrowed from telecommunications signal processing, can detect up to 10,000 targets in a single sample at PCR-like speed and cost. Founded by serial entrepreneur Pieter van Rooyen, the company is moving from R&D into commercial launch with backing from Deerfield Management and Foresite Capital.