General Orbit is building the world's first universal magnetic positioning system — a GPS-independent navigation layer that works across satellites, aircraft, ground vehicles, maritime, and subsea platforms. By exploiting Earth's stable crustal magnetic anomaly field as a natural reference, the company's proprietary hardware and machine-learning software deliver meter-class positioning without any external signals. Founded by a team that includes the world's leading magnetometer researcher and experts in sensor fusion, special operations, and manufacturing, General Orbit has already demonstrated its technology in space and is generating early revenue from NASA contracts and defense programs. Its business model combines hardware sales with a recurring data and software licensing flywheel built on a proprietary, high-resolution geomagnetic dataset.
GPS is the foundation of modern navigation and a trillion-dollar global economy, yet it is easily jammed or spoofed. There is no resilient, platform-agnostic alternative that works across all domains — satellites, air, land, sea, and subsurface.
General Orbit provides hardware and software that turn Earth's magnetic 'fingerprints' into always-on positioning for any platform. Their ultra-low SWaP magnetometer and machine-learning algorithms filter platform noise to enable meter-class accuracy without GPS, magnetic cleanliness requirements, or external signals — flight-tested at 1.4 m CEP50 position and 0.9° heading accuracy.
In their first year post-spinout the company signed a $50k NASA contract (with a $650k follow-on in progress), won 2 defense programs (Army T2COM and an Air Force CRADA), flew on 3 commercial space missions, and secured 7 patents. Pre-spinout, the University of Michigan team procured $9.4M across 3 NASA programs. Qualified pipeline stands at $102M with $9.5M in proposals submitted.
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