Startups showed up in force at Sensors Converge 2025, some setting up booth space, while others made quick Shark Tank-like pitches before members of the prestigious Autotech Council and another crowd gathered at the show’s Live Theater where free ice cream was served.
The energy by the pitchmakers suggested the world of tech startups is alive and well, especially in the sensors category. And John Harley, managing partner at Silicon Catalyst, a well-known incubator and accelerator focused on the semiconductor industry, assured a mostly young audience that investors and angels are out there, if founders are willing to put in the work.
“The money isn’t going to fall into your lap,” Harley told the founders. “Sensing [technology] is still in its early adoption stage even though sensing has been around for many decades. Still, the growth is real.” For investors, early stage investing is “inherently risky” meaning that startups “have to show them a significant reward.”
Harley presented a chart showing lidar tech was the main driver of a spurt of sensor funding in 2018 to 2022. From 2006 to 2025, there were 3,600 funding rounds with the total amount funded to small companies reaching $21.4 billion. Over the past decade, the US by far outpaced other countries in funding, reaching $7.3 billion, followed by Germany at $3.5 billion, China at $1.6 billion and Israel at $1.1 billion.
He urged startup founders to develop an Investor Deck of 12 pages focusing on the three things investors are looking for: Technology, TAM (Total Addressable Market) and Team. He suggested a template created by Sequoia Capital.
The hard work message was not lost on many of the pitchmen, including Niall Berkery, CEO and co-founder of Neumo, a small company out of Detroit developing tech using EEG technology embedded in the headrest of a car to sense when a driver is sleepy or distracted, among a series of other indicators.
Raising money for Neumo “has been a lot of work, a ton of networking--it’s like dating,” he told me after making his pitch onstage. ”It’s incredibly time-consuming.”
Even so, Berkery said Neumo’s tech has been validated to be three to five minutes faster than a camera in detecting a driver’s fatigue. The company also has three paid pilot projects underway and expects to provide four demos of the tech at CES in January 2026.
Another pitch came from Francis Pellegrino, CEO and Founder of AGR, a startup using hyper spectral imaging with nano-optics in special cameras mounted aboard tractors to detect crop diseases early, before they spread to help with targeted applications of pesticides and fungicides.
In a brief interview, Pellegrino said his toughest challenge has been approaching the large tractor manufacturers to adopt the AGR Spectre camera technology. “It’s like a closed ecosystem” that has been hard to break through, he said.
Pellegrino was one of the 40 Under 40 honorees at Sensors Converge 2025 and had traveled from Rochester, New York, to attend the event in Santa Clara, CA. One of his biggest concerns and frustrations is how to make investors and average consumers understand how vital farming and food are.
Having grown up on a farm and then becoming an engineer, he said he feels prepared to handle the demands of an ag-related startup but he clearly struggles with how to convey the vital farming message without being overly dramatic. “The problems of farmers are our problems,” he said at one point in his pitch, a statement of the obvious but also one that he keeps hoping to send home.