Swift Navigation recently announced a $50 million Series E funding round, marking a major milestone in its mission to deliver precise positioning at global scale. In this Q&A, I sit down with CEO and Co-Founder Timothy Harris to discuss the evolution of our core product, Skylark™ Precise Positioning Service, and how it’s unlocking autonomy and automation across industries.
EP: Tim, for new audiences, can you briefly explain what "precise positioning" or "precise GNSS" is, and why it's so important for technologies like autonomous vehicles?
TH: Certainly. Most people are familiar with standard GPS, like what’s in your smartphone, which typically provides your location with an accuracy of about 5 to 10 meters. While that’s fine for navigating to a coffee shop, it’s not nearly precise enough for things like self-driving cars or robots that need to know their exact location down to a few centimeters. Precise Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which includes GPS, dramatically improves this accuracy – up to 100 times more accurate than standard GPS. This centimeter-level precision is critical for safe and effective autonomy and automation.
EP: Swift Navigation just announced a $50 million Series E funding round, bringing our total capital raised to over $250 million. This is a significant milestone for us. Can you share how this funding reflects the company's journey and its impact on the industry?
TH: This Series E funding validates Swift Navigation’s vision and the critical role our precise positioning technology plays in enabling autonomy and automation at scale. From our beginnings in 2012, we set out to revolutionize GNSS positioning, making it accurate and affordable. We started by creating the industry’s first low-cost, high-accuracy RTK GPS receiver. While our early innovations included hardware, we’ve strategically evolved to become entirely focused on our SkylarkTM Precise Positioning Service. This funding fuels our mission to expand Skylark’s global reach and further solidify its position as the foundational technology for a safer, more connected, and autonomous future.
EP: Speaking of Skylark, it’s at the core of Swift Navigation’s current strategy. Can you elaborate on how Skylark has evolved and the milestones it has achieved since its launch?
TH: Skylark has been a game-changer for us and for the industries we serve. It’s a cloud-based GNSS corrections service that improves standard GPS accuracy by 100x, achieving centimeter-level precision. Since its inception, we’ve focused on making it a robust, scalable, and highly reliable solution.
A key milestone was achieving ISO 26262:2018 functional safety certification (ASIL-B) for Skylark. This was a monumental achievement as it made Skylark the first and only real-time, cloud-based service of its kind to meet such rigorous automotive safety standards. Unlike solutions relying on costly physical data centers, Skylark operates entirely in the cloud, offering high-integrity, safety-certified positioning at a fraction of the cost. This certification has been instrumental in our deep engagement with the automotive industry.
TH: Reaching over 10 million vehicles is a testament to the essential nature of precise positioning in modern automotive systems. The “all or nothing” vision of fully driverless robotaxis often captures headlines, but the real story of autonomous driving is the steady, “bottom-up” evolution of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Level 2+ and L3 systems are pushing these assisted driving experiences, allowing for automated and even hands-free driving on hundreds of thousands of miles of highway.
Precise GNSS is a foundational sensor in autonomous systems, complementing cameras and providing crucial contextual information. It compensates when these sensors become impaired by direct sunlight, rain, fog, or faded lane markings. It ensures reliable automated driving in challenging conditions, enhances lane-level maneuvers, enables cost-effective mass production of ADAS with standard-definition maps, and significantly increases safety through redundancy. Our cloud-based architecture and automotive safety certification have made precise GNSS an affordable and scalable solution for major automotive OEMs, allowing them to expand the operational envelope of their ADAS offerings to millions of vehicles globally.
EP: Swift Navigation has transitioned from a hardware-focused company to a software and solutions provider. How has our open ecosystem approach and partner program contributed to this evolution and your broader impact?
TH: The evolution to a software and solutions company, with Skylark as our core offering, has been greatly accelerated by our robust Partner Program. We believe an open ecosystem approach is absolutely critical to achieving industry transformation at scale. By fostering what is currently the largest ecosystem partner program in the industry, we enable seamless integration of Skylark across a wide range of platforms and devices.
We’ve established key collaborations with leading companies, including hardware partners like Telit, Sony, and Quectel. These partnerships are essential because they allow us to expand our reach and make precise positioning accessible to more customers and applications. They are also fundamental to unlocking mass-market adoption of high-precision GNSS by empowering high-volume applications across diverse industries
EP: Swift Navigation is also expanding globally through partnerships with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). Can you describe this unique model and its benefits for both reliability and unit economics?
TH: Our MNO partnerships are a distinct advantage in our global expansion strategy. These partners have collectively invested over $100 million to deploy and operate the most reliable precise positioning network in the world. This direct involvement ensures that Swift’s network is not only incredibly robust but also provides unparalleled reliability. This model allows us to achieve superior unit economics compared to our competitors, enabling us to deliver cost-effective solutions at scale.
EP: The landscape of precise positioning is rapidly evolving. Historically, it was dominated by legacy players focused on surveying and agriculture. Now, there are more players targeting mass-market applications with a wider variety of business models. How does Skylark differentiate itself and maintain its leadership in this increasingly complex environment?
TH: You’re right, the landscape has become far more dynamic. While precise positioning used to be the domain of specialized industries like surveying and agriculture, the demand for mass-market applications, from consumer vehicles to robotics, has exploded. In this evolving environment, Skylark’s core focus is on scale – meaning delivering cost-effective, reliable precise location that “just works everywhere.”
We differentiate by ensuring Skylark is the most flexible and scalable solution available. Our cloud-native architecture is a major differentiator. Unlike traditional precise positioning technologies that may rely on costly, physical data centers, Skylark operates entirely in the cloud. It leverages proprietary advanced atmospheric modeling, a cloud-based architecture, and carrier-grade networks to deliver unmatched reliability, safety, and cost efficiency at scale. This allows us to serve applications that require widespread, ubiquitous, and affordable precise positioning, enabling new levels of autonomy and automation across a multitude of industries.
EP: Beyond automotive, where else is Swift Navigation making an impact with Skylark?
TH: While automotive is a significant focus, Skylark’s impact extends far beyond. We’re actively unlocking autonomy and automation in diverse industries, including outdoor robotics and precision logistics. Our technology is crucial for applications requiring highly accurate real-time positioning, such as precision agriculture, construction, and drone operations. The ability to provide centimeter-level accuracy reliably and affordably opens up new possibilities for automation and efficiency across various sectors.
EP: Looking ahead, what's next for Swift Navigation? How will this new funding round accelerate our future growth and innovation?
TH: This Series E funding empowers us to accelerate growth, expand partnerships, and continue to innovate to unlock some of the most important technologies of our time. We’ll be driving further adoption in ADAS, autonomy, robotics, and precision logistics, and exploring new applications in areas like low-cost, high-accuracy digital mapping, precision mobile navigation, and V2X communication. We are continuously expanding Skylark’s coverage into new regions, recently announcing 100% coverage for our Nx RTK product in Western Europe, and growing in markets like Japan and Korea. Our goal is to continue to expand the availability of advanced features and make new, more interesting capabilities accessible to a broader consumer base, enabling a future where our cars and other autonomous systems are not just smarter, but also safer and more enjoyable to use.