Imagine being lost with no cell signal. Your last hope is that little blue dot on your map, the sign that a GPS satellite can see you. But what if you did not even have that?
Kanwar Singh believes he has a solution. For the past few years, he has been building a vision-based navigation system with his startup, Skyline Nav AI. The software, called Pathfinder, can look at almost anything, such as buildings, tree-lined roads, or even aerial views, and quickly match it to a database to generate real-time navigation.
This technology could be useful in a big city with tall buildings or on a canyon road surrounded by mountains, where the line-of-sight to a GPS satellite is blocked. Singh understands this problem personally; in 2014, his friend Hari Simran Singh Khalsa died while hiking in the mountains of Mexico after losing his way.
Singh says an even more important near-term use, which he considers crucial for national security, is that Skyline’s technology can serve as a backstop against an increasingly popular tool of modern warfare: GPS jamming.
This specific use case has already led Skyline Nav AI to work with the Department of Defense, NASA, and the defense contractor Kearfott. This is despite the company being a bootstrapped startup with just eight full-time employees.
Now, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Singh will pitch the technology on the Startup Battlefield stage; Skyline Nav AI is a Top 20 finalist in the startup competition. He is also bringing a new product to show off called Pathfinder Edge. This is a small edge computer with a compact version of Pathfinder that can be installed on almost anything to enable Skyline’s GPS-independent navigation.
Singh is quick to point out that visual navigation is not new. For example, Tomahawk missiles have long used a more rudimentary form of the idea. He said Skyline’s breakthroughs are twofold: the ability to navigate without GPS essentially anywhere by using AI to quickly recognize a scene, and accomplishing the same feat on the edge without expensive GPUs.
Singh eventually wants Skyline’s technology to be ubiquitous, but he does not see it as a GPS replacement. Instead, he thinks it will live alongside GPS, similar to how our phone calls automatically route over cell towers, Wi-Fi, or satellite without us noticing.
He said that when you buy your next car, drone, or sit in your next aircraft, it will be GPS-independent thanks to Pathfinder, with software that works on simple edge computing requiring no cellular or Wi-Fi.
It is a lofty vision, but Singh is comfortable taking big swings. A Sikh who immigrated to the U.S. nearly 20 years ago, Singh was getting his master’s at Harvard when he decided to join the U.S. Air Force after listening to a talk from Sen. John McCain. However, he was repeatedly rejected because of his hair, beard, and turban, which are visible articles of faith that prevented him from serving.
Instead of giving up, Singh lobbied Congress and the White House and was eventually able to enlist in the Army. But he was still asked to give up his articles of faith to join basic training, so he sued the Department of Defense. The department quickly granted religious exemptions to Singh and others, and he became an Army Captain and Battalion Signal Officer.
He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and military personnel and believes some things are worth fighting for. He said that as an American, he was being asked to choose between his First Amendment right to practice his faith and serving his country.
It was thanks to the military relationships Singh made throughout this process that he began working on the ideas at the foundation of Skyline Nav AI. He worked with the DOD’s Army Research Laboratory to develop GPS-independent navigation to combat the rise of GPS jamming. He then started Skyline, which licensed that technology from the laboratory.
Singh says the work he is doing at Skyline is a calling. He has even written an entire book about the risks of GPS going dark. But it is also already proving to be good business. The company has always been profitable, and he said they have been fortunate that customers have given them money to build the product before it was even ready to use.