US Army places $11M bet on Austin-based GPS alternative Tern

Austin-based startup Tern has won a contract from the U.S. Army to deploy its low-cost GPS-alternative technology, which the company calls “Google Maps for the battlefield.” The $11.26 million contract will see the Army use Tern’s navigation tech in vehicles, though the startup stayed tight-lipped on the exact scale of the deployment.

The Army is tapping Tern at a time when GPS disruptions are on the rise, especially in the Middle East and in the skies above Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. military itself has reportedly been experimenting with GPS jamming, which may have even contributed to the deadly crash of a medevac plane earlier this year. Congress and President Trump, during his first term, have made multiple efforts to develop resilient, non-GPS navigation technologies for military use.

Modern vehicles generate all kinds of data while driving, and Tern’s tech stack is built around using some of that information to navigate without GPS: a device plugs into the vehicle’s diagnostics board and connects to a tablet that serves as the soldier’s interface for position, navigation, and routing, according to Tern co-founder and CEO Shaun Moore. Moore said Tern passively listens to this information without disrupting its flow, then uses proprietary methods to make it usable for navigation, declining to go into specifics. He said significant engineering work went into being able to receive that data and output latitude and longitude.

This lets a vehicle determine its own position independently using edge processing, which is useful both on- and off-road, in tunnels, or in deserts. Moore’s co-founder Brett Harrison recently used the tech to navigate a 1,300-mile drive between Austin and Laguna Beach, California, and said Tern’s system never lost the vehicle’s place during the whole trip, while traditional GPS cut out dozens of times. Another key aspect of Tern’s approach is that it’s a closed system, making it harder for adversaries to disrupt than a simple backup would be. As a military veteran himself, Harrison said the Army contract is validating after years spent proving the technology works: “From the very foundation of when we decided to embark upon this effort, we recognized it has to be actually deployable, actually scalable, and not a science project.”

Why it matters

As GPS jamming grows more common near conflict zones, militaries — and eventually civilian infrastructure — may need to treat satellite positioning as a single point of failure rather than a given, opening a new market for GPS-independent navigation.