terahertz
(3)
Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey is the co-founder and CEO of Teradar, a Boston deep-tech company building a solid-state automotive sensor that sees in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sliver between microwaves and infrared. His pitch is blunt: combine radar's ability to punch through fog and rain with lidar's crisp resolution, then make it cheap enough to bolt onto a Ford Focus. After a friend died in a car crash that no existing sensor could have prevented, Carey teamed with terahertz specialist Gregory Charvat and chip architect Nicholas Saiz in 2020. In November 2025 the company left stealth with a $150 million Series B and claims to be validating its tech with five global automakers.
Dave Welch
Dave Welch is the founder and CEO of AttoTude, a Menlo Park deep-tech startup building the world's first terahertz interconnect that runs over wire instead of fiber or photonics, aimed at unclogging the data-movement bottleneck inside AI and hyperscale data centers. A co-founder of Infinera, where he pioneered large-scale photonic integrated circuits, and former CTO at SDL, Welch holds more than 200 patents, has authored roughly 300 publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In April 2025 AttoTude raised a $50M Series B, pushing total funding past $90M.
Barmak Heshmat
Barmak Heshmat is an optical physicist and entrepreneur who founded Brelyon, a San Mateo-based startup creating Ultra Reality displays that generate immersive panoramic virtual screens without any headset. A former MIT Media Lab research scientist and onetime head of optics at Meta's AR division, Heshmat ranked in the top 1% of Iran's national university entrance exam, earned a PhD in optoelectronics from the University of Victoria, filed 8 patents, published 20 journal papers, and now leads a company backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and Corning after raising $18.8M total - solving the fundamental problem of why no one wants to wear a computer on their face.