Skyline Nav AI: 10,000 Pathfinder units a month, no GPS

GPS has become ubiquitous since its commercial adoption in the 1980s, helping to guide everything from passenger cars to oceangoing ships to drones. But tall buildings, geological formations, and deliberate jamming or spoofing by hostile actors can disrupt those signals. Kanwar Singh, the company's CEO and a captain in the Army National Guard in Massachusetts, says GPS is a single point of failure and that the blue dots from satellites are easy to jam and spoof.

Singh launched the company in 2020 after receiving a call from the Pentagon, which was seeking a solution to the growing problem of America's adversaries disrupting the GPS signals of U.S. weapons systems. He notes that GPS jamming was significant in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but not publicly reported at the time. With battlefield tactics increasingly relying on drone technology in conflicts from Ukraine to Iran, the problem of GPS-denial attacks has become even more acute, and Singh says the company pivoted into drones and GPS-independence for drones when the Ukraine war kicked off.

The company prides itself on using U.S.-made components whenever possible, even though they tend to be more expensive than foreign-made materials, and has worked to establish a secure value chain compliant with National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requirements. The main constraint Singh cites is long lead times for items like computers, cameras or inertial sensors. The outcome for Skyline's go-slow expansion may hinge on whether it can keep that secure supply chain without sacrificing its low unit price, and that balance could matter for defense buyers who need affordable, trusted navigation backups.