We told you that collabs were becoming a bit of a thing around here.
Yesterday, drone visual navigation startup Vermeer announced a partnership with Sentry Operations, a low-profile terminal guidance and precision effects company. The two firms say they will work together to develop a full-stack, localized, and autonomous navigation platform for strike drones in EW-dense environments.
Films to the frontline: Vermeer has an unusual backstory for a defense startup. Its founder and CEO, Brian Streem, is an aerial cinematographer by training and got his start flying drones for movies. While working in the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, he realized the navigation tech he was developing had some pretty critical military applications.
He left his filmmaking dreams behind and made the well-trodden defense tech pilgrimage to Ukraine, where he built out Vermeer’s visual navigation system in the world’s de facto battle lab.
“I’ve spent the last two years living and working inside Ukraine’s fight,” Streem told Tectonic. “One truth is now undeniable: the future battlefield will not allow us to rely on communications links or GPS. Both are jammed, denied, or degraded the moment a conflict becomes real.”
Fly by sight: To cope with that battlefield reality, Vermeer—which closed a $10M Series A last month—developed a visual navigation system that enables drones to determine their precise location in contested, spoofed, and GPS-denied environments.
- Vermeer’s tech draws on up to four drone-based EO/IR camera feeds simultaneously, which cross-reference locations using a locally stored 3D map database.
- The system is trained on over 25,000 hours of aerial video of different terrains, weather conditions, and times of day, including nighttime.
- This “vision” allows drones to accurately and autonomously navigate in areas where satellite or RF-based navigation is degraded or denied, including on ultra-low-altitude flights that avoid air-defense radars and interceptors.
- This tech has proven pretty popular pretty quickly. Stateside, Vermeer’s customers include Lockheed, Northrop, AV, and Firestorm, as well as Ukrainian drone-makers like Skyeton.
Crossing the finish line: Sentry, meanwhile, is one of those “work in silence” companies, so much so that they don’t even have a working website. Spun out of GENIUS NY, a major uncrewed systems accelerator in upstate New York (of which Vermeer is also an alum), the company makes visual terminal guidance and precision-effects tech for UAS.
“[Sentry] does last-mile terminal guidance, and by merging what we do, which is getting you very close to a target without GPS, we essentially have a full solution that operates from launch to terminal phase without any need for comms or GPS,” Streem said.
Teamwork: Put simply, Vermeer’s visual navigation platform is “80 percent of the navigation, and then our Gambit platform is the final 20 percent for terminal guidance,” Sentry Operations president Jim Donnelly told Tectonic.
Donnelly added that Sentry’s tech has “been in development, gone through real-world testing, and is being delivered in production volumes” to undisclosed customers, though Streem said that they have “a lot of similar customers who were essentially begging for us to integrate our products together.”
“By merging Sentry’s terminal-guidance system with Vermeer’s vision-based navigation, we’ve created the only fully autonomous, man-out-of-the-loop end-to-end guidance stack on the market,” Streem said. “Together, they form a scalable, communications-denied, GPS-denied autonomous strike system—something no other guidance provider can credibly offer today.”
That should make a certain drone-hungry SecArmy’s ears prick up.