We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning.
Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate the position of a vehicle using only map information and a vehicle’s existing sensor data. The company’s pitch: It’s a cheap system that doesn’t require any additional expensive sensors.
At SXSW, the Austin-based startup demonstrated exclusively for TechCrunch that it could “derive a position from nothing.”
“No triangulation, no satellites, no Wi-Fi, nothing. We just figure out where we are as we drive,” Brett Harrison, co-founder and president, told TechCrunch while Cyrus Behroozi, senior software developer at Tern, loaded up the demo on his iPhone. “That’s really game changing because as we move away from triangulation-based, which limits technology, now we have the ability to be fully off that grid.”
Harrison says this breakthrough is important for a number of reasons. From a commercial standpoint, companies that rely on GPS — including ride-hail apps to delivery companies — lose time, money, and gas every time their drivers have to double back because of faulty GPS positioning.
More importantly, our most critical systems — from aviation to disaster response to precision farming — rely on GPS. Foreign adversaries have already demonstrated that they can spoof GPS signals, which could have catastrophic impacts both on the economy and national security.
The U.S. has signaled that it wants to prioritize alternatives to GPS. During his first term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reduce reliance on a single source of PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) services, like GPS. There are also several other initiatives which direct agencies and bodies like the Department of Defense and the National Security Council to ensure resilient PNT by testing and integrating non-GPS technologies.
“DeepSeek came out and said it cost us $6 million to do what it took [OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies] billions to do,” Harrison said. “To get that dot to move across a map in real time in a vehicle, it took the government billions of dollars and a few decades. We did it with less than $2 million.”
Tern came out of stealth in February 2024 and announced its $4.4 million seed round a few months later. That’s a quick turnaround to achieve the type of positioning I experienced this week at SXSW.
Testing Tern’s system in Austin
To start the demonstration, Behroozi connected his 2019 Honda Civic to his phone via Bluetooth, allowing the Tern application to pull in data from the vehicle’s existing sensors. He noted that Tern’s tech can be integrated directly into vehicles, beginning model years 2009 and up.
