Uhnder Inc., an Austin, Texas-based startup developing digital radar technology, recently has raised $45 million in series C funding.
The company, co-founded by Chief Executive Officer Manju Hegde and Chief Operating Officer Curtis Davis, raised funding in 2017 and in 2019, and most recently at the end of 2020, when it began discussing its radar-on-chip technology with trade publications.
This latest round of funding was led by Sensata Technologies, a spinoff of Texas Instruments that is heavily invested in radar technologies. The company’s other backers are a mix of investors, including Magna, Khosla Ventures, Sands Capital Ventures, ACME Capital, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, EDOM, TDK Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
The company’s radar-on-chip technology allows it to track objects and predict what they will do next, making it useful for technologies like autonomous vehicles. The company builds the chip, full sensor, module and software structure. This latest funding will help it grow and bring its chip into full production during 2021.
Uhnder already has a long-standing relationship with Magna, deploying automotive sensor technologies for autonomous driving. In 2018, Magna unveiled its Icon Radar, a high-resolution automotive radar that it worked on with Uhnder. Icon Radar continuously scans the environment in four dimensions, detecting and tracking almost 100 times more objects than other systems and individually classifying them, communicating these objects to the vehicle.
The company says that its digital radar is an evolution of traditional radar and that it plans to expand beyond the automotive sector to logistics, mining, agriculture, aerospace and construction in the future.
