US Army commits $11.26M to Tern's GPS-free vehicle navigation tech

The U.S. Army has signed an $11.26 million contract with Tern, an Austin-based startup building navigation technology that works without GPS, TechCrunch reports. The deal will put the company's system into Army vehicles, although neither side has disclosed how many vehicles or units are involved.

Tern describes its product as "Google Maps for the battlefield." For the Army, the deployment adds a positioning option that does not depend on satellite signals, which have become increasingly unreliable in and around active conflict zones.

How the system works

Modern vehicles constantly generate diagnostic and sensor data, and Tern's approach is to tap into that existing stream and turn it into a position estimate. CEO Shaun Moore told TechCrunch that the company's device plugs into a vehicle's diagnostics board and feeds a tablet, which serves as the soldier's interface for position, navigation and routing. The device only reads the data and does not interfere with the vehicle's systems, Moore said, and the startup applies what he called proprietary methods to convert that information into latitude and longitude coordinates.

Because the processing happens on the vehicle itself rather than in the cloud or via satellite, the system keeps functioning off-road, in tunnels and in remote desert terrain. Co-founder Brett Harrison recently tested it on a 1,300-mile drive between Austin, Texas and Laguna Beach, California. According to TechCrunch, Tern's system held its position for the entire trip while conventional GPS dropped out dozens of times along the way.

A reply to mounting GPS disruption

The contract lands amid a rise in GPS interference, particularly in the Middle East and in the airspace over Ukraine and Russia. TechCrunch also reports that the U.S. military has itself been experimenting with GPS jamming, which may have contributed to the deadly crash of a medevac aircraft earlier this year. Lawmakers in Congress, and the Trump administration during its first term, have previously pushed for resilient non-GPS navigation technology for military use.

Accuracy is only part of the appeal. Because Tern's system is closed and self-contained, it is harder for an adversary to jam or spoof than satellite-based positioning. Moore argued that most consumers underestimate how fragile the underlying infrastructure is, rarely questioning whether location services on their phones will keep working.

Founders with a military motive

Harrison served in Afghanistan as part of a special operations task force, and he told TechCrunch that the experience shaped the problem the company set out to solve. He said the team insisted from the outset that the technology be genuinely deployable and scalable rather than a "science project," built to operate in the field and serve a practical purpose. For him, the Army contract validates years of work proving the system performs outside the lab.

Why it matters

GPS is easy to take for granted, but it is a single point of failure for military operations and for large parts of civilian infrastructure. Jamming and spoofing are now routine features of modern conflict, and a navigation system that derives position from data already flowing through a vehicle offers a low-cost way around that vulnerability. The Army's $11.26 million commitment is a modest sum by Pentagon standards, but it signals concrete demand for alternatives to satellite navigation and shows a pathway for defense funding to reach small startups working on the problem. The open questions are scale and durability: Tern and the Army have not said how widely the technology will roll out, and sustained performance under battlefield conditions is a stricter test than a highway road trip.