I got lost. To make matters worse, there is no cell phone signal. The last thing to prevent you from completely panicking is that little blue dot. This is a universal sign that a GPS satellite somewhere in the sky is paying attention to you.
But what if you don’t even have that?
Kanwar Singh thinks he has found a solution. For the past few years, he has been building vision-based navigation systems with his startup Skyline Nav AI. The so-called Pathfinder software can examine just about anything, including buildings, tree-lined streets, and aerial photography, and instantly matches it against a database to generate real-time navigation.
This is useful if you’re in a large city with tall buildings or on a road along a valley surrounded by mountains that block line-of-sight to GPS satellites. (Singh knows this all too well: In 2014, his friend Hari Simran Singh Khalsa died after getting lost while hiking in the mountains of Mexico.)
But an even more important near-term application, Singh said, which he said is critical to national security, is that Skyline’s technology could serve as a backstop against GPS jamming, an increasingly popular tool in modern warfare.
It’s that use case in particular that has Skyline Nav AI already working with the Department of Defense, NASA, and the 100-year-old defense contractor Kiafot, despite being a bootstrapped startup with only eight full-time employees.
Now, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Singh will be pitching his technology on the Startup Battlefield stage. Skyline Nav AI has been selected as a top 20 finalist in a startup competition. And he brought a new product to show off: Pathfinder Edge. It’s a small edge computer with a scaled-down version of Pathfinder that you can install on almost anything to use Skyline’s “GPS-independent” navigation.
tech crunch event
san francisco
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October 27-29, 2025
Visual navigation is not new, Singh is quick to point out. Tomahawk missiles, for example, have long used more rudimentary forms of ideas, along with other technologies, to accurately attack targets. Mr. Singh said there are two things that are innovative about Skyline. One is the ability to navigate essentially anywhere without GPS by using AI to rapidly recognize scenes, and the other is to accomplish the same feat at the edge without expensive GPUs.
Singh ultimately wants to make Skyline’s technology widely available, but he doesn’t see it as a replacement for GPS. Instead, he thinks it will work in parallel with GPS, just as today our phones are automatically routed through cell towers, Wi-Fi, and even satellites.
“When you or I buy the next car, the next drone, or we sit in the next aircraft, we won’t rely on GPS because of Pathfinder and the software’s ability to work with simple edge computing that doesn’t require a cell phone or Wi-Fi,” Singh said in an interview with TechCrunch.
That is a noble vision. But Shin is comfortable taking big swings.
Singh, a Sikh who immigrated to the United States about 20 years ago, was earning a master’s degree from Harvard University when he decided to join the U.S. Air Force after hearing from Sen. John McCain. However, he was repeatedly rejected because his hair, beard, and turban, his visible articles of faith, interfered with his service.
Singh did not give up, lobbied Congress and the White House, and was eventually able to join the Army. However, he was asked to give up his articles of faith in order to attend basic training. So he sued the Department of Defense, which quickly relented and granted Singh and others a religious exemption, making him a captain and battalion radio officer.
“I come from a family of entrepreneurs and military personnel. You know, some things are worth fighting for,” he said. “This was one of those things where, as Americans, we were asked to choose our First Amendment rights to practice our faith or to serve our country.”
Singh was inspired to work on the ideas underlying Skyline Nav AI thanks to the many military relationships he built through this process. He worked with the Department of Defense’s Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to develop GPS-independent navigation to counter the increasing GPS jamming. He then founded Skyline, which licensed its technology from ARL.
Singh says his work at Skyline is a “calling.” (He even wrote an entire book about the risks of GPS failing.) But it’s also already proven to be good business.
“We’ve always been profitable, so we’ve been very fortunate that our customers, the people, have given us the money to build the product before it’s ready to be used,” he said.
If you want to learn directly from Skyline Nav AI, see more pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, visit here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, taking place October 27-29 in San Francisco.
