Streamline Systems, a two-person startup backed by Y Combinator, is building a drop-in GPS replacement for expendable drones and says the module will be available to buy in the first quarter of 2027. The company has not published any performance data.
That omission stands out because its rivals are already posting numbers. Theseus, another Y Combinator company, has published results from a 564.4-kilometer flight without GPS, and Xona Space Systems announced a $250 million Series D on Oct. 22 to build a commercial satellite alternative to the system.
What Streamline says it built
The company's website describes its product as "GPS-denied navigation. For expendable systems." Streamline claims the module works day and night, over land and water, resists electronic warfare and emits no radio-frequency signature. It also calls the product a "drop-in replacement for GPS on ArduPilot, iNav and PX4," three widely used open-source flight-control programs, and describes it as "Western made."
Those are the company's own claims. Streamline has posted no accuracy or drift figures, and a search turned up no third-party test reports as of Nov. 1, 2026.
Gabriel Poraj, the chief executive, wrote in a September LinkedIn post that "Ukraine showed that those signals can't be trusted. Jamming is now cheap, easy and routine." The module, he added, "delivers precise positioning to any platform it's integrated on, at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions." The company's website lists product claims and a Q1 2027 availability date but no pricing, so the "fraction" is a company claim with no published price points to compare against.
A small team, a thin paper trail
Charlie Jessett is the chief operating officer. A third-party profile put the team at two people as of late October and noted Cambridge ties for both founders, along with a Royal Air Force reservist role for Jessett. Jessett wrote that Streamline is joining Y Combinator's F26 batch.
A September blog post from the recruiting firm Zero G Talent said the startup was looking for founding mechanical and electrical engineers. The database Nordic9 lists "Investments: 500k" with no date. That figure is unverified, and no round announcement or cap table was public as of Nov. 1.
Readers searching for the company should note that other businesses share the Streamline Systems name, including audio-visual integrators and a water filtration firm. The company's own domain and its Y Combinator directory entry identify this one.
The jamming problem driving demand
Nick Careen of the International Air Transport Association said GPS signal loss events rose 220 percent between 2021 and 2024, according to a June 2025 release from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, or EASA. Jesper Rasmussen of EASA said at the time: "We are no longer just containing GNSS interference, we must build resilience." GNSS is the umbrella term for satellite navigation systems such as GPS.
EASA updated its interference safety bulletin on July 3, 2026. Defense News reported May 29 that Russia has steered Ukrainian strike drones by spoofing, or feeding them false satellite signals. A February 2026 report from the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) on lessons from Ukraine pointed to receivers that draw on multiple satellite constellations, fallback inertial systems and vision-based navigation.
The U.S. Navy is testing alternatives, too. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division demonstrated GPS-denied drone navigation and autonomous ship landings, Ocean News & Technology reported Oct. 14. Rear Adm. Todd Evans, the center's commander, said: "In contested areas where satellites and communications are jammed, autonomy gives significant advantage to our sailors."
Who else is competing
Theseus flew 564.4 kilometers without GPS in Florida in March, with a median horizontal error of 51.95 meters and no re-initializations, Defence Blog reported April 7. The flight lasted 5 hours 22 minutes.
In an April test at the Spanish Army's TEC-3 site, Spain's CATEC reported about 100 meters of cumulative error over 5 kilometers, or roughly 2 percent. Its chief executive, Joaquín Rodríguez Grau, said the technology is "fully mature and ready for transfer to the defence sector."
Trillium Engineering showed its GD-Nav system at Norway's Jammertest 2026, with evaluation prototypes planned for the third quarter of 2027 and a release in 2028. GMV and the European Defence Agency trialed image-based navigation at the REPMUS 26 exercise in September. The agency reported reliable performance over land and reduced performance at sea.
On the commercial side, ModalAI sells its VOXL 2 companion computer for PX4 and ArduPilot with GPS-denied software pipelines pre-configured. UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía updated its VNS01 visual navigation product in September.
Xona is taking a different path. Its $250 million Series D, announced Oct. 22 at a $2.45 billion valuation, brings total funding above $570 million, the company said. Service is planned for 2027. "We started Xona in 2019 because we believed the answer wasn't to simply recreate GPS with newer satellites, but to build something fundamentally better," Brian Manning, the chief executive, wrote.
Iridium, which completed its acquisition of Satelles in April 2024, markets a satellite timing and location service. A March 2026 company document reported timing accuracy of 50 to 240 nanoseconds against UTC(NIST). Those figures are vendor-reported.
What remains unanswered
Streamline's integration claim is plausible given how the open-source flight stacks work. PX4 and ArduPilot documentation describes external-vision aiding of their position estimators, and ModalAI ships on the same basis.
The Government Accountability Office's October report on complementary navigation lists inertial, camera and terrain, magnetic, gravity and celestial approaches alongside low-Earth-orbit systems. It does not name Streamline.
Regulation could add demand. The Federal Aviation Administration's proposed rule on flights beyond the operator's visual line of sight, known as Part 108, entered White House regulatory review July 10 and remained unfinalized as of Nov. 1.
For now, Streamline's first test is evidence. Its peers have published flight metrics and used venues such as Jammertest and REPMUS. The company says buyers can order in the first quarter of 2027, and as of Nov. 1 it had not published any accuracy or drift figures or third-party test reports.
