Shaun Moore. He sold a company that recognized faces. Now he's building one that recognizes places.
Person / Founder / Defense Tech
Shaun Moore
The entrepreneur teaching cars to know where they are - without ever phoning a satellite.
The entrepreneur teaching cars to know where they are - without ever phoning a satellite.
GPS phones home. Every time your car says "turn left in 200 feet," it is quietly asking a constellation of satellites 12,550 miles overhead where it is. Shaun Moore thinks that conversation is a liability. So at TERN, the Austin company he co-founded in 2023, he built a system that never makes the call.
TERN's product has a deliberately unglamorous name - the Independently Derived Positioning System, or IDPS. The idea underneath it is bold: figure out exactly where a vehicle is using only the sensors already bolted into modern cars, plus a cached map and a proprietary piece of software the team calls the "brain." No GPS. No GNSS. No cellular. The car works out its own location the way a seasoned navigator would, by reading the road instead of reading the sky.
At SXSW in March 2025, the company put on the kind of demo that is hard to argue with. They drove through Austin starting with nothing but a stored map and the car's raw sensor feed, and the system tracked the vehicle's movements the entire way. In the downtown core - the "urban canyon" of tall buildings where conventional GPS routinely loses its mind bouncing signals off glass - TERN didn't just keep up. It outperformed GPS.
Moore frames the value proposition with a line he clearly enjoys: "We can do GPS's job without having to call to space and say, 'Where am I?'" It sounds like a magic trick. It is closer to good engineering and a refusal to accept that one fragile system should sit underneath the entire economy.
The expectation now is that GPS will not be available in any future conflict.— Shaun Moore, on why TERN exists
That fragility is not theoretical. Moore points to a world map of jamming: Ukraine, where forces have lived under signal denial for years; Iran, which has openly admitted to jamming, even reaching for Starlink; Israel; and South America. "We've got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, to spoof the signals of GPS, which is scary," he has said. Aviation, emergency services, farming, power grids, logistics - all of it leans on a signal that an adversary can switch off.
TERN's answer is software-first and deliberately low-cost, designed to ride on the sensors a car already has rather than demanding expensive new hardware. That keeps the door open to two very different markets at once: the defense and national-security buyers who need positioning that survives a contested battlefield, and the commercial mobility and logistics operators who simply want navigation that doesn't break in a parking garage or a tunnel.
The TERN chapter is the second act. The first one started with a finance job and a passport. In 2012, Moore walked away from Merrill Lynch in Chicago and booked a one-way ticket to Casablanca, Morocco. The goal he carried with him was simple to say and hard to do: make technology accessible, personal, and trustworthy.
What came out of that leap was Trueface, a computer-vision company that grew into one of the fastest facial-recognition platforms in the world. He built it through the unglamorous parts - governance, regulators, raising capital, convincing cautious enterprises to trust a camera. Along the way he filed patents, including machine-learning-enhanced facial recognition and passive multi-factor access control.
In May 2021, Pangiam acquired Trueface. Moore stayed on as a board director and Chief AI Officer. He had taken a venture-backed company from a hotel-room idea to an exit. Most founders would have called that the whole story.
Left Merrill Lynch, flew one-way to Morocco, and started building Trueface.
Trueface acquired by Pangiam. Moore continues as board director and Chief AI Officer.
Co-founds TERN to solve a different blind spot: knowing where you are when the sky goes dark.
TERN was not dreamed up in a market-sizing spreadsheet. It started with a problem someone had actually lived. Co-founder Brett Harrison, a former Navy SEAL, watched GPS get contested and spoofed during operations in Afghanistan - and saw a battlefield frustration quietly graduate into a national-security risk. He brought that to Moore, who had already led the building of one of the world's fastest recognition systems.
The pairing is the point. A special operator who knew what failure felt like at 2 a.m. in hostile terrain, and a builder who knew how to turn high-integrity, real-time AI into a product. They added professional navigator Phil Reason, a 20-year special-operations leader, and engineering chief Manuel Seelaus. The result was IDPS - a company described, fairly, as veteran-built.
TERN is building on a decades-old foundation of global mobility to create a stronger, more resilient layer for the future.— Shaun Moore, on TERN's $7.5M raise
Moore describes his own through-line less as an industry and more as a habit of mind: find the foundational assumption everyone treats as fixed, then responsibly challenge it across technology, policy, and capital. At Trueface, the fixed assumption was that biometrics couldn't be both fast and trustworthy. At TERN, it's that knowing where you are requires asking outer space. He is, by temperament, a contrarian who likes to be proven right in a moving car.
TERN emerges publicly with a $4.4M seed round from Scout Ventures, Shadow Capital, Bravo Victor VC and Veteran Fund.
Derives a position from nothing on a live Austin drive - and beats GPS downtown.
Seed extension led by Scout VC, with the Vanderbilt Endowment and others, to accelerate satellite-free navigation.
We can do GPS's job without having to call to space and say, "Where am I?"
We've got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, to spoof the signals of GPS, which is scary.
The expectation now is that GPS will not be available in any future conflict.
TERN is building on a decades-old foundation of global mobility to create a stronger, more resilient layer for the future.
A finance kid from a selective portfolio-management program who decided the most interesting assets were the assumptions nobody questioned.
His first company began with a one-way flight to Casablanca, Morocco.
TERN's system has beaten GPS in the downtown urban canyon where tall buildings normally cause GPS to falter.
He went from teaching computers to recognize faces to teaching cars to recognize places.
TERN is veteran-built - its founders include a former Navy SEAL and a 20-year special-operations navigator.
Analytics Insight Innovator, 2019.
Los Angeles semi-finalist, 2019 & 2020.
Best Innovation in Computer Vision, 2020.
Beyond the trophies, Moore has delivered keynotes around the world and contributed to World Economic Forum work on the responsible use of emerging technologies - the kind of policy-table presence that matters when your product sits between defense buyers and the regulators who watch them.