Zephr emerges from stealth with $3.5M and plans to create a 'networked GPS' using cell phones
Summary
Zephr has emerged from stealth with radical plans to dramatically improve GPS using cell phones with zero hardware modifications.Mobile devices have abysmal GPS accuracy, which prevents location app developers in verticals spanning gaming to fitness tracking from truly taking advantage of the powerful little computer everyone carries in their pocket. Two of Zephrs four founders, Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao, felt this problem acutely during a previous venture, when they were tasked by a customer to build a visual positioning system for a company campus.To do so, Gorman and Rao set up a highly accurate differential GPS receiver known as a base station. The founding team have major bona fides in the mapping world: Among other achievements, Gorman was Snaps former mapping engineering manager; Rao was a computer vision engineer at Snap and head of engineering at Violet Labs; Stamatiou co-founded greenhouse gas emissions analytics company BlueSky Resources; and Nelson was a senior data scientist at Twitter, now X.The startups solution works by directing a group of phones in a given area to ping their GPS measurements to satellites, which then uses a software server to calculate an error correction similar to the one generated by receiver base stations. But then you can also do that anonymously, because were just looking at the measurements and then we send the error correction, so we dont know the location of the device but the device gets the correction to fix it.The company says it doesnt even need very many phones to improve GPS accuracy on each mobile device: just 10-15 mobiles within 10 kilometers of each other.Their plan has caught investor attention, with the company landing a $3.5 million seed round led by Space Capital and First Spark Ventures.Zephr validated its concept with help from Silicon Valley research giant SRI International, which operates a lab focused on positioning, navigation, timing (PNT) and GPS, where engineers focus on sophisticated simulations, modeling and benchmarking. Testing at SRI validated Zephrs concept and provided the startup with an investment from the research firms venture arm, SRI Ventures.The team, which stands at six full-time and two part-time, has since been doing field testing using real-world cell phones and differential RTK-GPS systems as ground truth.