Flight delays in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The truckers descended from unsafe routes inside Richmond, Vermont. And power outages throughout Ukraine. These problems stem from a global communication system that is heavily dependent on GPS satellites and the signals they transmit for basic functions.
To ensure that America’s infrastructure doesn’t collapse—even if the nation’s GPS satellites are disrupted by weather, war, or age—a Boulder, Colorado startup called Mesa Quantum is developing chip-sized alternative technology.
Specifically, Mesa Quantum makes “chip-scale atomic clocks” and other tiny quantum sensors that can measure and detect changes in the environment around a device to signal where it is in the world, where it needs to go, and maintain it. synchronization with other systems.
These sensors can ensure clear and stable video calls regardless of users’ location, or allow robots, underwater drones and autonomous vehicles to deftly maneuver through dense populations or around obstacles where GPS signals are weak or unavailable.
Co-founded by Mesa Quantum CEO Sristy Agrawal and CTO Wale Lawal in 2023, the company won a $1.9 million Space Force grant to demonstrate its alternative to GPS technology in military and civilian applications.
The company has also raised about $3.7 million in a first round of funding led by J2 Ventures, the Boston-based health and defense technology fund, along with hardware investors SOSV.
J2 Ventures co-founder and managing partner Alex Harstrick told CNBC that his fund backed Mesa Quantum in part because of the founders’ unusual technical backgrounds.
Agrawal recently earned a PhD from the University of Colorado, an elite program affiliated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her research focused on quantum information, computing and gravity.
Agrawal told CNBC that the lab below her office at the university houses the world’s most accurate clock. “Working here and interacting with all these different groups has led me to appreciate the impact that these technologies could have for real, not just theoretically in the future,” he said.
Its co-founder, Lawal, is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, completed his PhD at Rice University in materials science and nano-engineering, and an MBA at Harvard.
Before moving into corporate diving, he spent years at military research organizations, developing systems for use in “challenging GPS environments,” such as precision-guided missiles, drone technology and magnetic navigation systems used to guide military aircraft.
Lawal explained that military aircraft and other vehicles cannot afford to have their systems disrupted and jammed. Any disruptions could lead to “disastrous warfighter events” in the air and on the ground. “If drones lose GPS signals, which they rely on to monitor the environment and provide intelligence information to troops below range, troops cannot complete critical missions such as search and rescue.”
Many of the GPS satellites used by the US are now aging beyond their expected lifetime.
When they met, the scientific duo quickly agreed on the growing need for mass-manufactured, chip-scale technology to mitigate the risks of GPS-related failures in military and commercial systems.
Harstrick said his fund hopes Mesa Quantum will have the first demonstration of “atomic clocks” (quantum timing sensors) validated by a leading semiconductor manufacturing partner” in the coming years.
He also predicts that Mesa Quantum’s sensor technology will be in demand by companies that build or operate their own data centers.
Lawal explained, “Data centers use GPS to synchronize their networks today so they can accurately exchange communications or share data through the cloud. Any form of desynchronization of this network can cause errors—whether for a financial system, or a hospital system, or a social network.”
Technology to help data centers protect against such errors could help them prevent data loss and improve cyber security, the CTO said.
Regardless of which private sector players eventually embrace the startup’s quantum sensors, CEO Sristy Agrawal said the US government is likely to be among Mesa Quantum’s biggest early customers. “The US government has established major initiatives to spur innovation in this area and is looking to buy a million quantum sensors every year — if they can just be mass-produced,” he explained.
With the grant funding and seed round, Agrawal said, Mesa Quantum will look to grow its team in Boulder, especially by hiring individual molecular and optical physicists, engineers and manufacturing specialists this year.
The long-term vision, he said, is “to bring to market a series of quantum sensors that could do what GPS-based systems are capable of today—without all the risks and vulnerabilities.”
