You’re lost. Even worse, there’s no cell signal. The last thing keeping you from fully freaking out is that little blue dot — the universal sign that, somewhere up above, a GPS satellite has eyes on you.
But what if you don’t even have that?
Kanwar Singh thinks he’s got a solution. For the past few years he’s been building a vision-based navigation system with his startup Skyline Nav AI. The so-called Pathfinder software can look at almost anything — buildings, tree-lined roads, even aerial views — and quickly match it to a database and generate real-time navigation.
That could be useful if you’re in a big city with tall buildings, or on a canyon road surrounded by mountains, where line-of-sight to a GPS satellite is blocked. (Singh knows this all too well, too: In 2014, his friend Hari Simran Singh Khalsa died while hiking mountains in Mexico, having lost his way.)
But Singh says an even more important near-term use — one he says is crucial for national security — is that Skyline’s tech can be a backstop against an increasingly popular tool of modern warfare: GPS jamming.
It’s that use case in particular that has Skyline Nav AI already working with the Department of Defense, NASA, and 100-year-old defense contractor Kearfott, despite being a bootstrapped startup with just eight full-time employees.
Now, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Singh will make his pitch for the tech on the Startup Battlefield stage; Skyline Nav AI is a Top 20 finalist in the startup competition. And he’s brought along a new product to show off: Pathfinder Edge. It’s a small edge computer with a shrunk-down version of Pathfinder that can be installed on almost anything to enable the use of Skyline’s “GPS-independent” navigation.
Visual navigation is not new, Singh is quick to point out. Tomahawk missiles have long used a more rudimentary form of the idea along with other tech to precisely strike targets, for example. Singh 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 tech to be ubiquitous, but he doesn’t see it as a GPS replacement. Instead, he thinks it will live alongside GPS, much like how today our phone calls get automatically routed over cell towers, Wi-Fi, or even satellite — often without us noticing.
“When you or I buy the next car, the next drone, or we sit in the next aircraft, it’ll be GPS-independent thanks to Pathfinder, and the ability for this software to work on simple edge computing that requires no cellular, no Wi-Fi,” Singh said in an interview with TechCrunch.
It’s 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. But he was rejected, again and again, because of his hair, beard, and turban — visible articles of faith that prevented him from serving.
Instead of giving up, Singh lobbied Congress and the White House, and eventually he was 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 — which quickly caved and granted religious exemptions to Singh and others, and he became an Army Captain and Battalion Signal Officer.
“I come from a family of entrepreneurs and military personnel, and you know, there’s some things that are worth fighting for,” he said. “This was one of those things that, as an American, I was being asked to choose my First Amendment right to practice my faith or serve my country.”
It was thanks to the many military relationships Singh made throughout this process that he got working on the ideas at the foundation of Skyline Nav AI. He worked with the DOD’s Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to develop GPS-independent navigation in order to combat the rise of GPS jamming. And he started Skyline, which licensed that tech from ARL.
Singh says the work he’s doing at Skyline is a “calling.” (He’s even written an entire book about the risks of GPS going dark.) But it’s also already proving to be good business.
“We’ve always been profitable, and so we’ve been very fortunate that people, our customers, have given us money to build the product before it was even ready to use,” he said.
If you want to learn from Skyline Nav AI firsthand, and see dozens of additional pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make the connections that drive business results, head here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, held October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.
