The architecture of the modern world, from shipping networks to systematized agriculture and power grid synchronization to military operations, relies almost entirely on GPS for positioning and sequencing. GPS, in turn, relies on open satellite signals which are susceptible to jamming, spoofing, satellite-to-satellite sabotage, poor weather, and infrastructural or geographic dead zones. For most of us, GPS malfunction is a simple inconvenience. For America’s warfighters poor positioning is the difference between life and death.
Positioning should be a resource, not a liability.
Tern AI addresses GPS vulnerabilities with its Independently Derived Positioning System (IDPS™), which can determine precise location without calling out to satellites. Instead, IDPS uses onboard sensors, map data, and AI synthesis to provide stable, interference-free positioning.
More Thoughts From the Team at BVVC:
“We have spent decades building a global war fighting posture on a pretty frail lattice of satellites, a system so exposed that it can be shattered by a rogue actor with a fraction of our budget and none of our values. Our entire kill chain can be blinded in seconds. Movement slows. Precision fires miss. Autonomous systems stall. Convoys crawl or get slaughtered.
Tern’s software fuses inertial signals and terrain-aware visual data at the edge. There is no uplink dependency. No orbital weak point. No request for bandwidth. Just a self-reliant, map-aware entity that knows exactly where it is, even when the sky goes dark.
You do not need new hardware. You do not need satellite integrity. You need code. Tern’s code.
It threads seamlessly into existing systems (think: dismounted units, unmanned platforms, special mission vehicles) and gives them an unblinking sense of location. Not approximate. Not degraded. Precise—even in contested or obscured terrain.
In the next war, the one where space is the first domain to fall, the force with real-time positioning wins. The team at Tern gets this. We invested because the future will punish those who bet on peacetime architecture in wartime conditions. And we’re not interested in getting punished.”
“We’ve got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, to spoof the signals of GPS, which is scar. The economic impact in the United States, if that were to happen, would be catastrophic. Our goal is to remove the bull’s-eye that’s on the back of GPS right now. We can do GPS’s job without having to call to space and say, ‘Where am I?’ ”
– Shaun Moore, CEO and Founder