Every autonomous machine faces the same question before it does anything useful: where, exactly, am I? For trains threading crowded tunnels, robots moving down a factory line, or vehicles operating in places GPS never reaches, the answer has to be precise, repeatable, and instant. Answering it is the whole business of Humatics, and James Kinsey is the person now running the company.
Kinsey is the Chief Executive Officer of Humatics, a microlocation company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. The word "microlocation" is doing a lot of work: it describes technology that fixes the position of a moving object with far more precision than a satellite signal can offer, and keeps working underground, indoors, and in the dense metal environments where GPS simply fails. Humatics builds this as products - the Milo Microlocation System, a rail navigation system for transit, and chip-scale positioning aimed at manufacturing.
What Kinsey is working on now is scale. Humatics has moved from proving that precise positioning is possible to proving it can be installed, hardened, and relied on across real infrastructure. The clearest example is transit. The company completed a pilot that put its ultra-wideband positioning technology on 5.5 miles of live track in the New York City subway, one of the busiest transportation networks in the world. The pitch is deceptively simple: if a train always knows precisely where it is, trains can run closer together, which means more throughput and better safety without digging a single new tunnel.
That framing - location as a sense rather than a feature - runs through how Kinsey describes the mission. On the company's own pages he is presented as an engineer, entrepreneur, and executive focused on solving globally critical challenges: climate change, equitable transportation, and advanced manufacturing. It is a notably problem-first way to introduce a technologist. The product is microlocation, but the reason for the product is that better positioning quietly sits underneath cleaner transit, more efficient movement of goods, and factories that can automate work they cannot automate today.
The ocean-floor apprenticeship
To understand why Kinsey ended up building positioning technology, it helps to know where he learned the problem: the deep ocean, which is the most unforgiving GPS-denied environment on the planet. Before Humatics, he was on the scientific staff at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the world's leading centers for ocean science and engineering. His work there was developing navigation methods for underwater vehicles - robots that have to know their position with no satellite signal, no landmarks, and often no light.
The list of vehicles he helped develop and deploy reads like a catalog of modern ocean exploration: the Alvin manned submersible, the Sentry autonomous underwater vehicle, the Jason remotely operated vehicle, the Nereus hybrid ROV, and Nereid Under Ice, a robot built to work beneath the polar ice cap. These are not lab demonstrations. They are machines that carry people to the sea floor and travel to places humans cannot follow.
Kinsey did not just design from shore. He spent, by the company's account, over a year of cumulative time at sea. That included surveying the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and mapping shipwrecks - expeditions where the navigation system either works or the mission fails. It is one thing to write a positioning algorithm; it is another to stand on a ship and watch it steer a robot toward a target on the ocean floor.
From founding officer to the top job
Kinsey joined Humatics in 2016 as a founding officer, and the through-line from ocean robotics to microlocation is direct. The mathematical and engineering problem - estimating precise position from imperfect signals in an environment that fights you - is fundamentally the same whether the vehicle is a submarine at depth or a subway car in a tunnel. He brought that fluency to a young company and then, unusually, worked across nearly all of it.
He led Milo software and systems development, the core platform underneath the company's products. He won and delivered multiple train-signalling projects with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, turning research-grade positioning into contracts and installations on real transit infrastructure. And he founded the company's Mobility division, the group focused on transportation applications. Along the way he served as Chief Robotics Officer before moving into the CEO role.
That breadth matters for how he leads. A CEO who has personally shipped the software, won the customer, and stood up a business line understands the company as a working machine rather than an org chart. When Humatics talks about installability, durability, and ease of deployment - the unglamorous properties that decide whether hardware survives contact with a subway tunnel - it is speaking Kinsey's native language.
Hard tech, patient bet
Humatics sits in a category that is currently unfashionable and quietly essential: deep hardware. While much of the technology industry chases the next layer of software, Kinsey's company went the other direction - down to the physics, down to the radio signals, and down toward putting microlocation onto a silicon chip for millimeter-scale tracking. The company has described first-ever microlocation-on-a-chip technology aimed at applications in manufacturing, medical, and industrial settings, where sub-100-micron positioning could unlock automation that is impossible today.
Building this takes capital and time. In 2020, Humatics secured $30 million in Series B funding led by Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from a roster of strategic investors including Airbus Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Tenfore Holdings, and Presidio Ventures. That round brought the company's total raised to more than $80 million. The investor mix - aerospace, defense, mobility - reflects how many industries care about the same core capability: knowing precisely where a moving thing is.
Kinsey's academic foundation underpins the technical ambition. He holds a PhD from The Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor's in engineering from Stony Brook University, and he has been an author or co-author on more than 100 publications and patents. That is a research portfolio, not just a founder's bio, and it signals a company that treats positioning as a genuine scientific problem rather than a solved commodity.
What comes next
The near-term story for Humatics is turning proof into deployment - moving from a successful subway pilot toward wider transit installations, and from chip demonstrations toward factory-floor adoption. For Kinsey, the interesting part is that both directions serve the same mission he keeps returning to: making precise location a dependable utility for machines, and using it to make transportation and manufacturing more efficient and more sustainable.
It is a long arc, and a coherent one. The scientist who navigated robots across the ocean floor and beneath Arctic ice is now navigating a hardware company through the hardest phase any deep-tech startup faces - the leap from working technology to installed infrastructure. The scenery has changed from the sea floor to the factory floor. The question has not: where, exactly, are you?