GPS is one of those science fiction technologies that is effortless to use for the end user and endlessly challenging for the engineers who develop it. It is now at the heart of modern life: from delivering Amazon parcels to our cars and trucks to our walks through national parks, everything revolves around a pin on a map that monitors us to within a few meters.
However, GPS technology is decades old and is in dire need of modernization. The US, Europe, China, Japan and others have installed a new generation of GNSS satellites (GNSS is the generic name for GPS, the specific name for the US system) that deliver stronger signals in what is known as the L5 band (1176 MHz) . This means more accurate map points compared to the original generation L1 band satellites, especially in areas where the line of sight can be obscured like in urban areas. L5 was “designed to meet demanding requirements for the transportation of life safety and other high-performance applications”. as the US government describes it.
It’s one thing to put satellites into orbit (that’s the easy part!) And another thing to build energy-efficient chips that can search for those signals and triangulate a coordinate (that’s the hard part!). So far, chipmakers have focused on developing hybrid chips that pull out of the L1 and L5 ribbons at the same time. For example Broadcom recently announced the second generation of its hybrid chip.
OneNav has a completely different opinion on product design and got it right in his name. To avoid the hybrid-chip model of mixing old with new signals, a chip is supposed to monitor the singular band of L5 signals in order to achieve cost and energy savings for devices. A GPS to rule them all.
The company announced today that it has completed a $ 21 million Series B round led by Karim Faris at GV, funded entirely by Alphabet. Other investors included Matthew Howard of Norwest and GSR Ventures, who invested in previous rounds of the company. In total, OneNav raised $ 33 million in capital and was founded about two years ago.
The CEO and co-founder Steve Poizner has been in the local business for a long time. His previous company, SnapTrack, developed GPS location technology for mobile devices that Sold to Qualcomm for $ 1 billion in March 2000at the height of the dot-com bubble. His co-founder and CTO at OneNav Paul McBurney has also spent decades in the GNSS field, most recently at Apple, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Steve Poizner, CEO and Co-Founder of OneNav, here in 2009. Photo credit: David McNew via Getty Images
They saw an opportunity to start a new navigation company as L5 band satellites have been turned on in recent years. When they looked at the market and L5 technology, they decided to go further than other companies by eliminating the old technologies of older GPS technology and moving fully into the future. In this way, its design is “half the size of the old system, but much more reliable and powerful,” said Poizner. “We want to integrate location technology into a much wider range of products.”
He made a distinction between updating GPS and updating radio signals. “With these L5 satellites, we no longer need the L1 satellites [but] With 5G, you still need 4G, ”he said. L5 band GPS does everything that previous renditions did, but better, while wireless technologies often need to complement each other to provide top performance.
There is one caveat here: the L5 signal is still classified as “pre-operational” by the US government, as the US GPS system today only has 16 satellites transmitting the signal and 24 satellites to be fully deployed Targeted at the end of this decade. However, other countries have also deployed L5 GNSS satellites, which means they may not be fully functional from the U.S. government perspective, but may well be good enough for consumers.
According to Poizner, OneNav’s goal is to be “the arm of GNSS space”. What he means is that OneNav, like Arm, which makes the chip designs for nearly all cell phones worldwide, uses them to create comprehensive designs for L5 band GPS chips that can be integrated as system-on-chip into other manufacturers’ products they can “embed a high-performance tracking machine based on their silicon.”
The company also announced today that its first design client will be In-Q-Tel, the US intelligence community’s venture capital and business development organization. Poizner said of In-Q-Tel: “We now have a development contract with a US government agency.” The company expects its customer assessment units to be completed by the end of this year, with the goal of deploying OneNav technology in end-user devices potentially by the end of 2022.
Location tracking has become an important area of investment for venture capitalists. Companies are working on a variety of technologies outside of GPS to offer additional details and functionality where GPS is not enough. Poizner ultimately sees these technologies as a complement to what he and his team are developing at OneNav. “The better the GPS, the less pressure on these augmentation systems,” he said, while acknowledging it, “however, it is in certain environments [like downtown Manhattan or underground in a subway]You will never get the GPS working. “
For Poizner it is a return to entrepreneurship. Before founding OneNav, he was heavily involved in California state politics. Several years after SnapTrack was sold to Qualcomm, he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly. He was later elected California Insurance Commissioner in 2007 under former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He ran for governor in 2010 and lost in the Republican primary to Meg Whitman, who made a name for herself as the longtime head of eBay. He ran for his previous seat as California Insurance Commissioner in 2018. this time as politically independentbut lost.
OneNav is based in Palo Alto and currently employs more than 30 people.
