The Global Positioning System was not built for your phone. It was built so a nuclear-armed submarine could know exactly where it was before it fired. The U.S. Department of Defense launched the program in 1973, funded it because the Cold War demanded it, and opened it to civilians only after strategic necessity had already been served. That origin story matters now, because the same system that guides ride-share drivers and synchronizes bank transactions is being deliberately attacked, and the people attacking it understand its architecture better than the people who depend on it.
The Infrastructure Nobody Audited
When President Clinton removed Selective Availability in 2000, the policy that had intentionally degraded GPS accuracy for civilian users, the technology moved from useful to indispensable within a decade. Financial networks use GPS timing signals to sequence transactions. Shipping fleets use it to navigate contested straits. Precision agriculture, autonomous vehicles, emergency dispatch, and drone delivery all sit on the same foundation. The problem is that satellite signals traveling 20,000 kilometers are weak by the time they reach a receiver. A $500 jammer can overwhelm them over a city block. A $100,000 system can blind a city. Electronic warfare has made that arithmetic a budget line item.
The Wall Street Journal's technology columnist Christopher Mims reported on this directly, noting that the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world's oil transits, is now effectively a GPS dead zone. That is not a localized incident. In 2024, daily airline flights experiencing GPS spoofing grew from approximately 300 in January to around 1,500 by August. Between August 2023 and March 2024, some 46,000 aircraft over the Baltic Sea reported signs of jamming. Investigators looking at the December 2024 Azerbaijan Airlines crash are examining whether GPS interference played a role. The pattern is not random. Electronic warfare does not respect national borders, and the Strait of Hormuz will not be the last chokepoint.
What Advanced Navigation Is Betting
On March 18, 2026, Sydney-based Advanced Navigation announced a $110 million Series C. The round was led by Airtree Ventures and included Quadrant Private Equity, the Australian government's National Reconstruction Fund, and existing investors KKR, In-Q-Tel, and Alpha Intelligence Capital. In-Q-Tel is the Central Intelligence Agency's venture arm. That the CIA's investment vehicle is in the cap table is not incidental. It reflects a belief that GPS-denied navigation is now a national security product category, not a defense niche.
The company builds inertial navigation systems that fuse onboard sensors, artificial intelligence, and high-precision hardware to maintain positioning when GPS signals are degraded, jammed, spoofed, or simply absent. Inertial navigation was first developed for the Apollo lunar program. Advanced Navigation is commercializing it at scale, with more than 100,000 systems already deployed across defense, mining, maritime, and space applications. Customers include Anduril, Rheinmetall, BHP, and Intuitive Machines. The company reported triple-digit revenue growth in 2025, and the U.S. and Europe together account for more than 80 percent of its revenue. The new capital will fund regional positioning, navigation, and timing centers of excellence in those markets, with engineering teams closer to customers, and potential acquisitions in robotics, photonics, and quantum sensing.
The Question for Technology Executives
CEO Chris Shaw framed the company's thesis plainly: the world's reliance on any single navigation technology has moved from a technical limitation to a systemic vulnerability. That sentence applies beyond navigation. Any enterprise architecture built on a single external signal, whether GPS timing, a cloud provider's availability zone, or a single-vendor AI API, carries the same structural exposure. The GPS story is a case study in how civilian infrastructure inherits military-grade threat models without military-grade resilience budgets.
The viability question for a chief information officer or chief technology officer evaluating this space is straightforward: which of your operational systems assume GPS availability, and what is the failure mode when that assumption breaks? For most organizations, the answer is either unknown or underestimated. Advanced Navigation's unicorn valuation, confirmed at this round's close, is the market's signal that the window for auditing that assumption before an incident is narrowing.
Sources
Advanced Navigation. "Advanced Navigation Secures US$110M Series C to Catalyze the Next Era of Autonomous Systems." Advanced Navigation, 18 Mar. 2026, www.advancednavigation.com/news/advanced-navigation-secures-us110m-series-c-to-catalyze-the-next-era-of-autonomous-systems/.
Mims, Christopher. "GPS Is Becoming a Casualty of War." The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 2026.
"GPS Signals Are Being Jammed as a Form of Electronic Warfare." Marketplace, American Public Media, 17 Mar. 2026, www.marketplace.org/story/2026/03/17/gps-signals-are-being-jammed-as-a-form-of-electronic-warfare/.
Trimble Resource Center. "Plan Ahead for GPS Jamming / Spoofing in an IoT-Rich World." Trimble, 2 Dec. 2025, positioningservices.trimble.com/blog/positioning/en-US/article/gps-jamming-spoofing-targeted-industries.
SandboxAQ. "The Growing Threat to GPS That Policymakers Can't Ignore." SandboxAQ, Feb. 2026, www.sandboxaq.com/post/the-growing-threat-to-gps-that-policymakers-cant-ignore.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "Global Positioning System History." NASA, www.nasa.gov/general/global-positioning-system-history/.
"Advanced Navigation Raises $110M Series C to Usher New Era of Autonomous Systems." GPS World, 19 Mar. 2026, www.gpsworld.com/advanced-navigation-raises-110m-series-c-to-usher-new-era-of-autonomous-systems/.
