US Army Awards Tern $11.26M Contract for GPS Alternative

The contract comes as GPS disruptions are increasing, especially in the Middle East and in the skies above Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. military itself has reportedly experimented with GPS jamming, which may have contributed to the deadly crash of a medevac plane earlier this year. Congress and President Trump, during his first term, have pursued multiple efforts to develop resilient, non-GPS navigation technologies for military use.

Tern's system is built around data that modern vehicles already generate while driving. Co-founder and CEO Shaun Moore said in an interview that the company provides a device that plugs into a vehicle's diagnostics board and is wired to a tablet. The tablet serves as the soldier's interface, providing position, navigation and routing, he said.

Moore said Tern is "passively listening to" that vehicle information and does not disrupt its flow. The company then uses "proprietary methods" to make the data usable for navigation, he said, declining to provide specifics. "There is quite a bit of work that was done to get it to the point where we can just receive that information and then output latitude / longitude, so big effort by our team," Moore said.

The approach allows a vehicle to determine its own position independently through edge processing, which Tern says is useful on and off road, in tunnels and in deserts. Co-founder Brett Harrison recently used the technology to navigate a 1,300-mile drive between Austin and Laguna Beach, California. He said Tern's technology never lost his vehicle's place during the trip, while traditional GPS cut out dozens of times.

Tern says another important feature is that its technology is a closed system. That makes it not only a backup to GPS but also harder for adversaries to disrupt. "I don't know that there is broad awareness on the fragility of the [GPS] system from a consumer standpoint," Moore said. "I think people just see the blue dot on their phone and say it will always be there because it's there now, right? Why wouldn't it be there?"

Harrison, a military veteran, said the Army contract validates years of work by Tern to prove the technology functions. He said his time in Afghanistan as part of a special operations task force was a major part of why he wanted to solve the problem. "From the very foundation of when we decided to embark upon this effort, we recognized it has to be actually deployable, actually scalable, and not a science project," he said. "We weren't interested in just seeing what we could prove. We wanted to make sure it actually was something that could get into the wild and serve a purpose."