Turn off the GPS on your phone and you are annoyed. Turn it off on a mine haul truck, a naval drone, or a lunar lander and you have a problem that physics has to solve. Advanced Navigation exists in that gap - the moment the satellites stop answering and the machine still needs to know exactly where it is, which way it is pointing, and how fast it is going.
The company builds navigation systems that lean on motion, light and sound instead of a signal from space. Gyroscopes that measure rotation using loops of fibre optic cable. Accelerometers and AI that estimate position from movement alone. Acoustic beacons that fix a submarine's location by pinging the water. The pitch, in the words of co-founder Xavier Orr, is blunt: it is "GPS without satellites."
From a thesis to a business
Advanced Navigation started the way a lot of hard companies do - as academic research nobody expected to leave the building. Xavier Orr studied mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Western Australia and wrote his thesis on applying neural networks to inertial navigation. Instead of filing it away, he and business partner Chris Shaw turned it into a company in 2012. Shaw runs the business as CEO; Orr drives the technology.
The idea underneath the thesis has aged well. Inertial navigation - tracking where something is by continuously measuring how it moves - has existed for decades, but the sensors drift, and correcting that drift used to mean either very expensive hardware or a constant GPS fix. Orr's bet was that AI could squeeze far better accuracy out of cheaper sensors. That bet became the Certus line, and the company's habit of putting software where competitors put more metal.
The satellites are a single point of failure for the entire autonomous economy. Advanced Navigation's whole business is the answer to what happens when they blink. The strategic bet, in plain terms
What it actually makes
The catalogue spans a lot of physics, but it sorts into a few families. At the top sits Boreas, a strategic-grade system built around a Digital Fibre Optic Gyroscope the company markets as the world's first fully digital FOG. Below it, the Certus family delivers what Advanced Navigation calls FOG-like performance from small, AI-assisted MEMS sensors. Then there is the underwater work - the Subsonus acoustic positioning system and Hydrus, a hovering underwater drone small enough to launch by hand.
Who buys it, and why they can't compromise
The customer list reads like a stress test. Defense is the largest slice - Advanced Navigation says its systems are used by nine of the world's top ten defense companies, in exactly the contested environments where GPS jamming is the point. Space is the most dramatic: the LUNA sensor was selected to help guide a lunar landing. In between sit marine survey firms, mining operators running autonomous haulage, drone builders, and even a 37th America's Cup racing team that fitted Spatial FOG Dual and Certus units to its race boats.
What links them is that a wrong answer is expensive. A survey vessel that loses position wastes a day at sea. A defense platform that drifts in a jammed environment fails its mission. That is why the demo numbers matter more than the marketing: in a US Army contested-environment test, the company's Boreas D90 reportedly drifted roughly 7.5 metres over 65 kilometres with GPS switched off.
The money, mapped
Advanced Navigation has raised in three institutional steps, each one bigger than the last, and each pulling in the kind of investor that signals where the company is pointed. Main Sequence and In-Q-Tel - the latter tied to US intelligence - came in early. KKR led the Series B. The 2026 Series C brought in Airtree Ventures, Quadrant Private Equity and Australia's National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, the last a signal that sovereign navigation capability is now a national-interest question.
Why it looks different from the incumbents
The established names in inertial navigation - Honeywell, Northrop Grumman, Exail, KVH, VectorNav, SBG Systems, Trimble - mostly grew up as specialists in one layer. Advanced Navigation's difference is that it is vertically integrated and unusually broad. It designs its own photonic chips, builds its own gyroscopes, writes its own AI and firmware, and spans inertial, acoustic, photonic and quantum sensing rather than picking one. When supply chains seize up, owning the stack is a hedge; when a customer needs a custom system, it is a shortcut.
Be the catalyst of the autonomy revolution. Advanced Navigation's stated mission
Where it sits in the market
Zoom out and Advanced Navigation occupies the unglamorous, mission-critical layer beneath every autonomous system. Self-driving cars, delivery drones, seabed robots and lunar landers all share one dependency: they have to know where they are, precisely, in real time, whether or not a satellite is cooperating. That is a small phrase covering a very large market, and it is the layer the company has spent fourteen years building for.
The business model matches the position: B2B hardware and systems, sold directly and through distributors, with customised solutions and support around it. Because so much of the value lives in the AI and the in-house manufacturing, the company keeps margins that a pure assembler could not. The 2026 raise is aimed at acquisitions in photonics, vision, AI and quantum sensing - a bet that the next decade of navigation is won by whoever owns the most sensing physics.
There is a quiet irony in a company this global being run from George Street in Sydney, exporting photonic chips and underwater robots from a country better known for resources than deep-tech hardware. Founders Chris Shaw and Xavier Orr won Sydney's top young entrepreneur award before most of the industry knew the name. The name is easier to find now.