Spartan Radar Raises $10 Million in Seed Funding to Advance Autonomous Vehicle Radar Software
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., Aug. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Spartan Radar, a provider of biomimetic automotive radar solutions, today announced that it raised $10 million in a seed round led by Prime Movers Lab and 8VC. Additional investors include Mac VC, Alumni Ventures Group, Broom Ventures and Gaingels. Spartan Radar builds cutting-edge software that improves radar performance for use in autonomous vehicles, making radar competitive with lidar, which has traditionally been used by auto manufacturers in self-driving vehicle applications. 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. The company’s software is almost entirely hardware agnostic and can be deployed on existing radar systems, potentially even in cars already on the road as an over-the-air system update. “The automotive industry’s pivot to lower levels of automation makes radar more attractive than lidar,” Spartan Radar Founder and CEO Nathan Mintz said. “While showing lots of initial promise, lidar is failing to live up to all the hype, but the need for high resolution systems hasn’t gone away. The processing power finally exists to utilize advanced algorithms like super-resolution in real time to make radar a far better option for automakers.”