Funding round led by Prime Movers Lab
LOS ALAMITOS, CA – November 3, 2021 – Spartan Radar, the leader in biomimetic radar solutions for automated mobility, today announced that it closed $15 million in a Series A round led by Prime Movers Lab. The round comes on the heels of a $10 million seed round raised earlier this year. The market has a large appetite for technology that will enable L4 technology to scale in the near future and sell into L2 systems today. The funding will help Spartan scale its continued efforts to recruit top talent while furthering productization of its game-changing safety technology.
Spartan Radar’s software uses machine learning and edge-processing to improve existing radar performance to provide a robust, all-weather, high-resolution sensor to support safe commercialization of L2+ autonomous mobility. Sensor fusion and advanced imaging radar are vitally important for the scaled deployment of autonomous vehicles. Radar has a proven safety record in automotive and can rapidly scale due to cost and ruggedness compared to the nascent lidar product. Spartan’s Biomimetic Radar™ mimics human perception processes for enhanced focus and context; proprietary algorithms dramatically speed up processing and reduce radar’s historic shortcomings, including lower resolution and false detections, clearing the way for ADAS level 2 +safety and commercialization. The company’s software is almost entirely hardware agnostic and can be deployed on existing radar systems.
“After billions of dollars in investments and several AV companies going public, the industry is finally ready to move beyond R&D to commercialize at scale in defined use-cases like last mile delivery, trucking, and robo-taxi. OEMs and AV developers need safe, robust sensor solutions that are ready to go to market next year and we’re prepared to meet that need,” Spartan Radar Founder and CEO Nathan Mintz said.
An alarming trend in vehicle fatalities underscores the need for new ADAS solutions to support L2 and beyond. According to Reuters, traffic deaths soared 18.2% during the first half of 2021, the largest 6-month increase in fatalities ever recorded, mainly due to unsafe driving behaviors such as speeding and distracted driving.
“Unfortunately, we are seeing evidence that lidar-based systems can behave like the distracted drivers they were intended to replace. Spartan’s radar systems are a leap forward in autonomous vehicle technology, bringing AVs and ADAS systems to where they need to be for the needs of the industry today,” said David Siminoff, General Partner at Prime Movers Lab, who will be joining Spartan Radar’s board.
“Spartan Radar has the team and technology to scale in both the growing ADAS and emerging AV markets. Spartan Radar’s innovative systems engineering and edge processing expertise inherently gives the company a strategic advantage. The company is extremely well-positioned to capitalize on the growth of autonomy.” said Grayson Brulte who is an Innovation Strategist and Co-Founder of Brulte & Company.
Additional investors include 8VC and Mac VC.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and human augmentation. Portfolio investments span in-space transportation, industrial solar heat, ag tech, brain upgrades, nano-structured materials, wafer slicing, prosthetics, 3D printing, mobility, longevity and AI. For more information, please visit https://www.primemoverslab.com.
Spartan Radar is a next-generation automated mobility sensor software provider—with extensive expertise in Radar Digital Signal Processing and antenna design. Spartan’s flagship software package called “Ago” is mainly used to increase the performance of existing radar designs in a computationally efficient manner. For more information, please visit www.spartanradar.com and follow Spartan on LinkedIn.
Contact:
Jazze Reppert
E: jazze@spartanradar.com
