Advanced Navigation opens U.S. factory in Huntsville

Advanced Navigation, an Australian maker of navigation systems that keep working when GPS is jammed or spoofed, is setting up a U.S. headquarters and factory in Huntsville, Alabama, to build the gear closer to American defense customers.

The company’s U.S. arm, Advanced Navigation America, said the site will be a Positioning, Navigation and Timing Center of Excellence that researches, develops and manufactures navigation technology for military platforms. Product production is scheduled to start in 2027. Mike Cohen, president of Advanced Navigation America, told Axios Huntsville the facility should be running around March or April.

The plant will go into a former Line-X facility near Huntsville’s airport, Axios reported. At first, it will produce about 25% to 30% of what the company’s Australian operation turns out, Cohen said, with the goal of eventually matching it. The company has not said how much it is spending on the site or how many people it will hire.

The expansion is funded from a $110 million Series C round the Sydney-based company closed in March, led by Airtree Ventures with backing from investors including KKR and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. Cohen told Axios the money is also being spread across the company’s operations in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Advanced Navigation’s core products are inertial navigation systems, which work out where a vehicle is by measuring its own motion from a known starting point, without relying on satellite signals. The company’s high-end systems use fiber-optic gyroscopes, sensors precise enough to detect the Earth’s rotation. It also builds laser velocity sensors. Advanced Navigation says it is one of the few companies able to make strategic-grade fiber-optic gyroscopes at scale, a claim it has not backed with production figures.

“With technology this precise, you can’t separate engineering from manufacturing,” said Chuck Matheny, vice president of U.S. operations at Advanced Navigation America.

The company said the Huntsville site will also work on other ways to navigate without GPS, including MEMS sensors, vision-based systems, AI and quantum sensing, and will be used for U.S. acquisitions of companies with related technology. It said the facility will support classified U.S. Department of War programs.

Advanced Navigation said its customers include Anduril, Kongsberg, Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, Leonardo and Lockheed Martin. It works with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army on future navigation requirements through programs including the All-Domain Persistent Experiment. The company said it has more than 100,000 systems in use worldwide, and in March reported that more than 80% of its revenue comes from the United States and Europe.

“We’re putting the people who build and missionize this technology within minutes of our defense customers, changing how quickly we understand a requirement, solve it and deploy it into the field,” said Mike Cohen, president of Advanced Navigation America.

Huntsville is home to Redstone Arsenal, the Missile Defense Agency, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the headquarters of U.S. Space Command, and hosts offices of most major U.S. defense contractors.

The company pitched the move against the Pentagon’s push into autonomous systems, for which the fiscal 2027 budget request includes $53.6 billion. Drones, robotic vehicles and guided weapons all depend on knowing where they are, and GPS jamming and spoofing have become routine in Ukraine and the Middle East.