How Swift Navigation aims to make centimeter-level positioning affordable at automotive scale—with carrier partnerships, a cloud-first corrections network, and safety metrics designed for control-loop trust.
In this article, CEO Tim Harris outlines Swift Navigation’s strategic foundation, while the following article illustrates the company’s SD Maps strategy in the field. Swift built a cloud architecture and carrier-backed network for automotive-grade integrity at scale. The Augmented SD Maps model is one of the clearest demonstrations of why that architecture matters—not just to automotive, but to any fleet or adjacent platform that needs situational awareness and cost efficiency.
Swift Navigation’s leadership describes its mission in plain terms: “to be the volume leader in autonomous systems so we can change the way everything navigates the Earth down to a centimeter.”
That goal has guided the company from its start as a Kickstarter campaign to its current position supplying correction services and hardware to major automotive, robotic and industrial customers. In a recent discussion, CEO Tim Harris explained how Swift’s approach differs from that of earlier precision-GNSS providers—and why the company believes scalable, affordable centimeter-level positioning is now achievable.
Early Focus and Market Entry
“We saw early adoption in agriculture, GIS and land surveying,” Harris said. “We came to the market late, and at that time precision GNSS was less than 1% of the overall market—less than 10% of the revenue. We asked ourselves why.”
Most of the precision-GNSS sector, Harris said, was serving a narrow professional audience using equipment priced between $8,000 and $10,000 per receiver. “If it costs $10,000 a pop, it’s not going into phones, it’s not going into cars, it’s not going into robots,” he said.
The company decided to attack that barrier directly. “We used to get calls from competitors asking why we were lowering prices,” Harris recalled. “They were all making money and having fun at those price points. We knew we had to drive down user price to open up new applications.”
Building for Scale
Lowering hardware cost was only part of the equation. Swift also needed a correction service that could support mass deployment. “Once you do that, you have to come up with the world’s most scalable, highest-performing correction service targeted on next-generation applications,” Harris said.
Early adopters were in agriculture, construction and mining, but Swift wanted to design a system that could serve everything that moves. “We built the whole system from scratch to support that vision,” he said.
Technology: An Evolution on Top of RTK
Swift’s technology extends conventional RTK methods rather than replicating them. “The technology we use is an evolution on top of RTK,” Harris explained. “It models the core physics of the problem, providing benefits in performance, density and reliability, and it allows us to deploy as a cloud system at scale.”
That architecture has made a different kind of network deployment possible. “We partner with wireless carriers to create high-quality networks at scale,” he said. “Instead of clusters here or there, we have continental coverage.”
By coupling carrier partnerships with a cloud-based backend, Swift has sidestepped the cost and density constraints that limit many ground-station networks. The result, Harris said, is lower cost and higher redundancy. “It allows us to operate on a much lower cost structure with higher levels of reliability.”
Integrity and Safety
From the beginning, the system was designed to be usable by control systems that require determinism. “Everyone has experienced GPS jumps that put you on the other side of the road,” Harris said. “Imagine if that’s controlling your car.”
Swift incorporated continuous monitoring of failure modes and formal safety metrics. “Because we built our system from the ground up for those markets, we can provide guarantees around error rates and outliers,” he said. The company’s current certification level is ASIL-B, used as a subcomponent within ASIL-D automotive systems.
“That makes the system trustable by a car,” Harris noted. “Outside of China, we’re roughly a 90% market leader in the automotive industry because we built for their price points, for the coverage, and for their safety requirements.”
Automotive as a Platform for Growth
Automotive accounts for about half of Swift’s business. “About 40% of all GPS-chip dollars go into cars,” Harris said. “We built for that scale from day one.”
He attributes Swift’s position to designing for cost and reliability from the outset. “It’s hard to take what you have and adapt it for automotive,” he said. “Having built for that scale from scratch, we can support the number of users, the density of network, the performance, and the safety required.”
The same infrastructure, he added, can now be applied to other markets: “Once you have that foundation, it becomes easy to pick it up and drop it into new applications.”
Ground Robotics and Consumer Equipment
Swift is targeting categories where annual production volumes exceed 10,000 units. “We’re focused on emerging categories—ground robotics and robotic lawn mowers in particular,” Harris said. “That’s our sweet spot.”
He expects those systems to drive substantial adoption. “We’re pretty sure we’ll be the dominant market leader in robotic lawn mowers as well,” he said with a laugh. “Think Roombas for your lawn.”
For smaller autonomous platforms, the company’s low-cost corrections allow manufacturers to design products that would not otherwise support precision positioning. “We focus on the next generation,” Harris said. “We spend less time in markets like mining, where the installed systems are already committed to other networks.”
Delivery Robotics and Drones
Swift sees renewed interest in delivery and aerial systems but approaches the sector with caution. “There were a lot of false starts in the first wave of ground delivery,” Harris said. “We’re now seeing a second wave that’s smaller, lower-cost, and often paired with human drivers.”
For drones, early experiments dating back to the company’s first year of business gave Swift a broad base of experience. “We had 500 drone company customers early on, but it was highly fragmented,” he said. Consolidation in the UAV market narrowed those opportunities, though Harris noted new entrants and delivery applications are re-emerging.
“The labs that went on ice are restarting,” he said. “There’s new movement in delivery robotics and drones, and we’re seeing steady progress rather than hype.”
Consumer and Industrial Segments
“There’s a huge difference between consumer and industrial markets,” Harris said. “In consumer products the systems are smaller and safer. Industrial systems require higher safety and performance and, of course, cost more.”
Mass-market production, he added, benefits both sides. “Consumer features and low-cost sensors often migrate upward into commercial products,” he said. “Driving down sensor cost and improving performance at scale helps the industrial market as well.”
Detecting and Flagging Errors
The core technical challenge for Swift was to make GNSS usable in control loops. “Positioning systems are stochastic—there’s randomness in them,” Harris said. “Multipath can put you on the wrong side of the highway. Historically, we avoided the problem by working in open fields or waiting for it to settle. Avoiding the problem isn’t solving the problem.”
Swift focused instead on detection. “We had to solve the core problem of how to make GPS positioning trustable by a control system,” he explained. “You’ll never remove all errors from GNSS, but if you’re extremely good at detecting them and telling the system not to use a position, you can reach error rates as low as one missed event in a thousand years of operation.”
That, Harris said, “lets a vehicle or a robot use the data deterministically instead of statistically.”
Financing and Expansion
Swift Navigation recently completed a $50 million funding round, bringing total capital raised to $250 million. “Fundraising is never the goal,” Harris emphasized. “It’s fuel in the tank to keep going toward the vision.”
The company intends to use the capital to support customers as they transition to volume production. “We meet customers where they are and help them ship systems at serious scale—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions,” he said.
Harris indicated that a major production milestone will be announced later this year. “We’ve been working on some of these markets for over a decade,” he said. “They’re finally going to volume production.”
A Measured View of the Road Ahead
Asked about what comes next, Harris pointed to steady growth rather than sudden disruption. “We built for scale and for safety,” he said. “That combination opens up every category that depends on reliable positioning.”
The company’s strategy remains consistent: lower cost, maintain integrity, and expand coverage. “We’re focused on driving autonomous navigation systems and providing the best coverage and the lowest prices,” he said.
In Harris’s view, the transition from niche to mainstream precision positioning will come from practical engineering, not marketing slogans. “Our job is to make precise navigation something manufacturers can depend on,” he said. “That’s when autonomy becomes real—when it just works.”
 & Carnegie Robotics CTO Chris Osterwood (R).jpg "Swift Navigation, Carnegie Robotics Partnership to Yield High-Precision GNSS, Inertial Technology Products")
