The St. Louis-based startup Impossible Sensing has successfully spun out a second company leveraging its core technology, which uses a high-powered laser to determine the exact contents of materials in front of it. The technology was originally developed for space—but it turns out to have application right here on Earth.
The second company, TerraBlaster, recently closed out an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round, raising close to $4 million. It’s focused on developing a high-precision soil sensor that could hook onto the back of a farmer’s planter and provide real-time data on nutrient levels, soil health, water conditions, and other factors around individual plants.
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
“It’s going to be able to open a little trench in the soil, have our laser look inside a few inches down, and then close up the trough like [it] never happened,” says Impossible Sensing founder Pablo Sobron.
TerraBlaster is licensing the technology from Impossible Sensing, with Sobron acting as an advisor to the new company and supporting the technology development, he says. Developing this kind of agricultural application for Impossible Sensing’s core technology is something Sobron has been working on for years. He says he’s finally figured out the secret sauce to commercialization.
“I thought that the technology and the fit with the customer problem was so good that that would be enough for investors to jump into the opportunity,” Sobron says.
Even so, investments didn’t immediately flow. Everything changed when Sobron was able to recruit Jorge Heraud and Matt Colgan to be TerraBlaster’s CEO and CTO, respectively.
“As soon as those two became part of the team, that was the missing part for investors to jump into the opportunity,” Sobron says. “[Agriculture] is an industry that doesn’t have that level of investment that other industries have, so there is really more inherent risk for the investor putting a bet into a new application that nobody had tried before.”
Heraud and Colgan offer decades of experience successfully bringing technological innovations to market in the agriculture space. Heraud’s Blue River Technology developed See & Spray, a technology that can differentiate weeds from other plants, thus applying herbicides much more efficiently.
Agribusiness giant John Deere acquired the company in 2017 for $305 million, marking one of the biggest exits for a tech company in the agricultural space. After the acquisition, Heraud stayed on at John Deere to lead the company’s robotics, automation, and autonomy efforts for another seven years.
With TerraBlaster, Heraud says he can focus on solving another critical issue in agriculture: overfertilization. Fertilizer is one of the largest input costs for large farms, Heraud explains, yet the market incentivizes overuse because farmers want to guarantee crop yields that will ensure their operations eke out a profit or at least break even each year.
“There’s this big asymmetry where it’s a lot more costly to be under than over,” he says, adding that overuse of fertilizer comes with many negative consequences, including contaminating surface and groundwater and even causing a massive zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s devoid of oxygen.
Heraud says he had been trying to find a solution to help farmers use fertilizer in a more “information-driven way,” though he admits he wasn’t immediately sold on leading Sobron’s ag-focused venture so soon after leaving John Deere in 2024.
“I thought I was going out, but then I fell in love with this company. It’s the largest opportunity to have impact in agriculture,” Heraud says. “Probably what made me flip was realizing [the] similarities between what I had been building with See & Spray and herbicides, and this being a similar yet next step into something bigger and more impactful.”
TerraBlaster’s thesis revolves around providing more data to large-scale farmers, without creating more work for them. With just one of Soborn’s laser sensors mounted on a planter collecting data samples in real time, Heraud says farmers can circumvent costly and time-consuming soil testing techniques where soil samples are collected and analyzed every two and a half acres.
“You put one per planter [and] you can get a resolution of 0.1 acres, a 25-fold increase in resolution,” he says.
That level of precision could help farmers not only use the right amount of fertilizer in very specific parts of the land they cultivate, but also reveal other aspects of the soil’s nutrient profile at a more granular level. TerraBlaster has plans for field tests with the soil sensor this fall, likely in Iowa or Illinois, two states with massive agricultural presences.
“We’re creating what I call a production prototype,” Heraud says. “Still a prototype, but instead of using generic, off-the-shelf type parts, it will look a lot more like a piece of equipment that belongs in agriculture.”
Heraud says this next phase in his career represents the culmination of his experience with innovation in the agricultural landscape. The product he’s developing now may be different, but the players are the same: “There’s still farmers, agronomists, equipment manufacturers. I’m still working in the same ecosystem.”
And that has made attracting capital all the more frictionless. Case in point is Khosla Ventures, which had funded Blue River Technology, but only after many meetings, he says.
“This time I talked with them and I was able to convince them in just a week and a half,” Heraud says. “They were ready to go. I had the confidence from them already built, my credibility was already well established.”
And for Sobron, the early funding success of TerraBlaster represents a replicable model for commercializing the technology he helped develop to study Mars. This is now the second investor-backed company based around it, with the first focused on reducing emissions from oil and gas production. He has his eye on a third: Mineral exploration, with the technology deployed to identify sources of critical clean energy inputs, such as lithium, cobalt, and others.
“All of these industries have the key to speed up decarbonization, electrification, and they have the know-how, the money, and the scale to really help us achieve some of the net-zero goals,” Sobron says. “But they’re lacking this ability to measure what the heck is going on and eliminate inefficiencies.”
