Skyline Nav AI’s software program can information you wherever, with out GPS — discover it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

You’re misplaced. Even worse, there’s no cell sign. The very last thing maintaining you from totally freaking out is that little blue dot — the common signal that, someplace up above, a GPS satellite tv for pc has eyes on you.

However what in the event you don’t even have that?

Kanwar Singh thinks he’s received an answer. For the previous few years he’s been constructing a vision-based navigation system along with his startup Skyline Nav AI. The so-called Pathfinder software program can take a look at virtually something — buildings, tree-lined roads, even aerial views — and shortly match it to a database and generate real-time navigation.

That could possibly be helpful in the event you’re in an enormous metropolis with tall buildings, or on a canyon highway surrounded by mountains, the place line-of-sight to a GPS satellite tv for pc is blocked. (Singh is aware of this all too nicely, too: in 2014, his buddy Hari Simran Singh Khalsa died whereas mountain climbing mountains in Mexico, having misplaced his method.)

However Singh says an much more necessary near-term use — one he says is essential for nationwide safety — is that Skyline’s tech is usually a backstop towards an more and more in style instrument of contemporary warfare: GPS jamming.

It’s that use case particularly that has Skyline Nav AI already working with the Division of Protection, NASA, and 100-year-old protection contractor Kearfott, regardless of being a bootstrapped startup with simply eight full time workers.

Now, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Singh will make his pitch for the tech on the Startup Battlefield stage; Skyline Nav AI is a High 20 finalist within the startup competitors. And he’s introduced alongside a brand new product to indicate off: Pathfinder Edge. It’s a small edge pc with a shrunk-down model of Pathfinder that may be put in on virtually something to allow using Skyline’s “GPS-independent” navigation.

Visible navigation shouldn’t be new, Singh is fast to level out. Tomahawk missiles have lengthy used a extra rudimentary type of the thought together with different tech to exactly strike targets, for instance. Singh stated Skyline’s breakthroughs are twofold: the power to navigate with out GPS primarily wherever by utilizing AI to shortly acknowledge a scene, and conducting the identical feat on the sting, with out costly GPUs.

Singh ultimately needs Skyline’s tech to be ubiquitous, however he doesn’t see it as a GPS substitute. As an alternative, he thinks it would dwell alongside GPS, very similar to how at the moment our telephone calls get routinely routed over cell towers, Wi-Fi, and even satellite tv for pc — usually with out us noticing.

“Whenever you or I purchase the following automobile, the following drone, or we sit within the subsequent plane, it’ll be GPS-independent because of Pathfinder, and the power for this software program to work on easy edge computing that requires no mobile, no Wi-Fi,” Singh stated in an interview with TechCrunch.

It’s a lofty imaginative and prescient. However Singh is comfy taking massive swings.

A Sikh who immigrated to the U.S. practically 20 years in the past, Singh was getting his grasp’s at Harvard when he determined to affix the U.S. Air Pressure after listening to a chat from Sen. John McCain. However he was rejected, many times, due to his hair, beard, and turban — seen articles of religion that prevented him from serving.

As an alternative of giving up, Singh lobbied Congress and the White Home, and ultimately he was in a position to enlist within the Military. However he was nonetheless requested to surrender his articles of religion to affix fundamental coaching. So he sued the Division of Protection — which shortly caved and granted spiritual exemptions to Singh and others, and he turned an Military Captain and Battalion Sign Officer.

“I come from a household of entrepreneurs and navy personnel, and , there’s some issues which can be value preventing for,” he stated. “This was a kind of issues that, as an American, I used to be being requested to decide on my First Modification proper to apply my religion or serve my nation.”

It was because of the various navy relationships Singh made all through this course of that he received engaged on the concepts on the basis of Skyline Nav AI. He labored with the DOD’s Military Analysis Laboratory (ARL) to develop GPS-independent navigation to be able to fight the rise of GPS jamming. And he began Skyline, which licensed that tech from ARL.

Singh says the work he’s doing at Skyline is a “calling.” (He’s even written a whole guide in regards to the dangers of GPS going darkish.) But it surely’s additionally already proving to be good enterprise.

“We’ve all the time been worthwhile, and so we’ve been very lucky that folks, our clients, have given us cash to construct the product earlier than it was even prepared to make use of,” he stated.

If you wish to be taught from Skyline Nav AI firsthand, and see dozens of extra pitches, attend worthwhile workshops, and make the connections that drive enterprise outcomes, head right here to be taught extra about this 12 months’s Disrupt, held October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.