Skyline Nav AI can guide you anywhere, without GPS — find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

You are lost. What’s worse is that there is no cell signal. The last thing stopping you Completely What’s spooky is that little blue dot — the global sign that there’s a GPS satellite somewhere up there watching you.

But what if you don’t have that?

Kanwar Singh believes he has the solution. For the past few years, he has been working on building a vision-based navigation system through his startup Skyline Nav AI. The so-called Pathfinder software can look at almost anything — buildings, tree-lined roads, even aerial views — and quickly match it to a database and create real-time navigation.

This may be useful if you are in a large city with tall buildings, or on a valley road surrounded by mountains, where the GPS satellite’s line of sight is obscured. (Singh knows this well, too: In 2014, his friend Hari Simran Singh Khalsa He died while hiking in the mountains in MexicoAfter he lost his way.)

But Singh says the most important near-term use — one that he says is crucial to national security — is that Skyline’s technology could serve as a backup against an increasingly common tool in modern warfare: GPS jamming.

It’s this use case in particular that Skyline Nav AI is already working with the Department of Defense, NASA, and 100-year-old defense contractor Kearfott, despite being a startup with only eight full-time employees.

Now, in TechCrunch disabled 2025Singh will present his technology presentation on The emerging battlefield platform; Skyline Nav AI is one of the top 20 finalists in the startup competition. And he brought with him a new product to show off: the Pathfinder Edge. It is a compact computer with a miniature version of Pathfinder that can be installed on almost anything to enable use of the Skyline’s “GPS-independent” navigation system.

Visual navigation is nothing new, as Singh is quick to point out. For example, Tomahawk missiles have long used a more primitive form of the concept along with other techniques to precisely strike targets. Singh said Skyline’s accomplishments are two-fold: the ability to navigate GPS-free essentially anywhere using AI to quickly recognize the scene, and accomplish the same feat at the edge, without expensive GPUs.

Singh eventually wants Skyline’s technology to be ubiquitous, but he doesn’t see it as a replacement for GPS. Instead, he believes it will work in conjunction with GPS, much like how our phone calls today are automatically routed through cell towers, Wi-Fi, or even satellites — often without us noticing.

“When you or I buy the next car, or the next drone, or when we sit in the next plane, it will be GPS independent because of Pathfinder, and the ability of that software to run on simple edge computing that doesn’t require cellular or Wi-Fi,” Singh said in an interview with TechCrunch.

It is a sublime vision. But Singh is comfortable taking big swings.

Singh, a Sikh, immigrated to the United States nearly 20 years ago and was earning his master’s degree at Harvard University when he decided to join the US Air Force after listening to Senator John McCain speak. But he was repeatedly rejected because of his hair, beard, and turban, visible matters of faith that prevented him from serving.

Instead of surrendering, Singh lobbied Congress and the White House, and was eventually able to enlist in the army. But he was also asked to abandon his beliefs to join basic training. So he is File a lawsuit against the Ministry of Defense – That quickly She surrendered and was granted religious exemptions Lessing and others, and he became an army captain and battalion signal officer.

“I come from a family of entrepreneurs and military personnel, and you know, there are some things worth fighting for,” he said. “This was one of the things that I was being asked, as an American, to choose my First Amendment right to practice my faith or serve my country.”

Thanks to the many military connections Singh made during this process, Singh was able to work on the ideas in founding Skyline Nav AI. He worked with the Department of Defense’s Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to develop a GPS-independent navigation system in order to combat increasing GPS jamming. He started Skyline, which licensed the technology from ARL.

Singh says the work he does at Skyline is “a calling.” (He even wrote an entire book about the dangers of GPS malfunctions.) But it’s already proven to be good business.

“We’ve always been profitable, so we’ve been very fortunate that people, our customers, have given us money to build the product before it’s ready to go,” he said.

If you want to learn from Skyline Nav AI first-hand, experience dozens of additional presentations, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Head here to learn more about this year’s Disruptheld from October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.