MatrixSpace is a company re-imagining radar, addressing the next generation of AI-enabled radar to digitize the outdoors. Pulse 2.0 interviewed MatrixSpace co-founder and CEO Greg Waters to learn more.
Greg Waters’ Background
Waters spent most of his career leading public technology growth companies in semiconductors and sensors.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the great teams in wireless communications, from WiFi and Bluetooth to Cellular and semiconductor, you name it. It’s been a great deal of fun to have worked with some of the most innovative and talented teams, and most recently, the areas of AI and smart sensing.”
Formation Of MatrixSpace – How did the idea for MatrixSpace come together?
“My prior company, Integrated Device Technology, was in the process of being sold and waiting for approval by government regulators. This was 2019, and the early examples of semi-autonomous machines were starting to make their appearance. There was a group of us in the tech industry, including a Northeastern University research scientist, Dr. Jose Martinez Lorenzo, that began to get serious about creating a company that would enable all sorts of smart machines through what we came to call AI Collaborative Sensing. MatrixSpace was born at the end of 2019.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for MatrixSpace so far?
“There are many, and most of them would be when our team’s got something to work that was brand new in the industry and very hard to do. True innovation at a product level is tremendous fun but very difficult to do in reality. We knew from the first days that to solve the AI collaborative sensing problem well that the team would have to be built as a deeply talented cross-functional team. Seeing all of that talent come together to deliver working products and customer demonstrations is always scary to attempt–but very satisfying when we pull it off.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges you face in building the company?
“I think the challenges of building a company that aspires to genuine leadership are many! The first is to crystallize a vision of what problems we will solve. To create a leadership business, those problems need to be very big ones – or customers won’t value you. That vision then needs to be supported by the credibility of how we are going to go about solving those problems, which comes from the people working on them, and the data we were able to produce that showed the problem was solvable. Then comes the fun but difficult part of turning those concepts into real products that customers want to buy – and most companies don’t do that well. But we think that’s a great deal of fun.”
Core Products
What are MatrixSpace’s core products and features?
“We extend the human senses in outdoor environments, and we do that by creating small, lightweight, and low-power sensor products that can be placed outdoors quickly and easily and can be powered from a small solar panel.”
“Our first product, MatrixSpace Radar, is what we believe is the world’s smallest and lightest high-performance radar, which is about the size of a smartphone. This radar allows people to “see” in the dark, through smoke and fog, and to detect and track small objects at a distance of a couple of kilometers. We combine that with optical sensor data so people now have the ability to detect people, vehicles, drones, and planes at a considerable distance – not the short distance that autonomous cars are currently limited to. Our AI filters out most of the detections that people don’t care about and provides alerts for the ones that they do care about.”
Evolution Of MatrixSpace’s Technology
How has MatrixSpace’s technology evolved since launching? “Our tech was built to evolve quickly. Our initial radar product, MatrixSpace Radar, is software-defined, meaning that we can change aspects of the radar performance quickly and easily. We have unique wireless communications technology that allows our sensors to talk to each other and combine their information, much like the way our brain combines the information coming from our eyes and ears. You’ll see a steady stream of unique, innovative new product announcements every six months or so.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of MatrixSpace’s most significant milestones?
1.) Coming out of nowhere and winning substantial business with sophisticated customers in a variety of industries and applications;
2.) Recruiting the caliber of people that currently work here and growing the team; and
3.) Showing that an entirely new concept in how to make outdoor sensors extend human ability not only works but will change the way we are able to do things outdoors.
Customer Success Stories
“Our customers are all engaged under NDA, so not at this time, though we can outline some application-level successes. The first is that our radars are so small, light, and inexpensive that they are being used by a wide variety of light aircraft, from industrial drones to small planes, to increase the level of safety and semi-autonomous flight that’s practical. Right behind this is safety and security on the ground.”
Funding
“We just announced our Series A, raising $10 million at a favorable company valuation. This was a heavily oversubscribed round that could have been much larger if we wanted it to be. This brings total funds raised since our company’s formation in December 2019 to about $20 million. More important than the money is the strength of our core investors in the Raptor Group and Intel Capital, both of whom are formidable.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is MatrixSpace pursuing?
“Our technology is applicable to many vertical markets, but the most obvious is the global safety and security system business, which is currently pegged at $49 billion. We completely change physical safety and security on the ground or in low airspace, and that is something that society cares a great deal about right now.”
Differentiation From The Competition
“A strongly cross-function approach to AI collaborative sensing. We innovate at the pure AI level, at the sensor level, such as our new Radar announcement, and in our proprietary know-how of how to create real time networks for these sensors to share information.”
Future Company Goals
“We will completely change the way people are able to operate outdoors, starting with dramatically improved safety and security and then enabling people to direct the activities of smart machines to do things at a distance – that has previously been impossible. We believe we can build a very significant business around that.”
