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08 Oct 2025
Former Coherent CEO Chuck Mattera joins the Virginia-based software startup as its new chairman.
HyperSpectral, a US-based startup specializing in hardware-agnostic spectral analysis software, says it has raised $7 million in a “series A-2” round of venture funding.
The Alexandria, Virginia, company, which earlier this year won an SPIE Prism Award in the software category for its “SpecAI” platform, added that the support would help accelerate development, expand partnerships, and position the company for another round of funding next year.
Chuck Mattera involved
The latest funding round was co-led by RRE Ventures and Kibo Ventures, and also featured investment from Avalanche Thinking, a venture outfit established by former Coherent CEO Chuck Mattera - who will now become HyperSpectral chairman.
"This round underscores investor conviction in our progress and potential,” commented HyperSpectral CEO Matt Theurer, who co-founded the startup with COO Lauren Stack, and CTO Vince Lubsey.
“We are aiming to scale rapidly into the broad biotech, industrial, and defense markets and are excited to have Chuck Mattera join our Board. Chuck's leadership and experience will be instrumental as we penetrate these markets in the US and expand globally.
“In its initial deployments, HyperSpectral's platform combines chemical physics and materials-science-based spectroscopy with advanced AI algorithms trained on proprietary data sets, enabling the rapid, non-invasive detection of bacteriological pathogens in minutes and without specialized lab preparation.
“This results in immediate breakthroughs in lower costs, faster cycle times, higher quality and better reliability.”
AI-powered spectroscopy
Writing on LinkedIn, Mattera noted that HyperSpectral represented his venture firm’s first investment, and that as a graduate student in chemistry at Brown University he had himself worked on Raman and other spectroscopy techniques that now underpin HyperSpectral’s approach.
“While the last 100 years have seen tremendous scientific progress in the applications of new lasers to spectroscopy for laboratory experiments, I believe that the combination of spectroscopy with AI and machine learning is going to be a hardware and information game changer for the next,” Mattera wrote.
“And I think that this is consistent with the view of other industry leaders, as well, recognizing the power of the combination of the physical sciences and AI.”
He indicated that HyperSpectral was targeting a wide range of applications, for example in operating rooms, chip fabs, factory floors, and process control for bioreactors, adding:
“HyperSpectral is taking what once took days in a lab and making it possible in minutes, wherever decisions are made.”
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