What happens when GPS goes down: jammed, spoofed, or completely denied?
In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Michael Biercuk, founder and CEO of Q-CTRL, to explore one of the most surprising breakthroughs in quantum technology: quantum navigation. While most of the quantum world is focused on computing, Q-CTRL is building something entirely different: AI-powered quantum sensing systems that can navigate aircraft, drones, and vehicles without GPS.
Even more surprising? This technology didn’t exist just over a year ago. Now it’s already shipping.
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This episode of TechFirst is sponsored by Apprentice
Did you think AI was only for digital work? Nope … AI-native manufacturing is here. This month’s sponsor is Apprentice, which offers the first AI Agent built from the ground up for agentic manufacturing. Connects to all your systems, monitors everything, automates all your processes … but keeps a human in the loop. Check it out at apprentice.io.
Watch our conversation here:
You’ll learn:
- How quantum sensors can “see” invisible features of the Earth
- Why magnetic and gravitational fields enable GPS-free navigation
- How this system achieves 100x better accuracy than current GPS alternatives
- Why it works in environments where other systems fail (clouds, water, darkness, interference)
- The role of AI software in stabilizing fragile quantum systems in real-world conditions
- What this means for aviation, defense, and the future of autonomous systems
This is a deep dive into a fast-moving frontier where quantum meets real-world deployment, and it’s happening faster than almost anyone expected.
Story: GPS is a single point of failure. Someone just fixed that.
Fourteen months ago, quantum navigation didn’t exist. Not in any real sense: it hadn’t been validated, hadn’t been tested, hadn’t been proven outside a pristine lab with floating concrete slabs and enough vibration isolation to survive a plane crash next door.
So anytime someone wanted to hack navigation on a battlefield, in a city, or over a country, they could do so with just a few hundred dollars of hardware and a laptop running an open source program.
In other words, GPS is wildly insecure.
Only now is that starting to get fixed.
GPS is everywhere
GPS is everywhere. It’s in your phone, your car, every commercial plane overhead, every drone the military flies. You probably own 2 or 3 devices that access GPS signals. It’s the invisible backbone of modern navigation.
It’s also trivially easy to jam. Or spoof. Or just… deny.
We’ve watched it happen in real conflict zones: Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East. GPS goes dark and suddenly you’ve got multi-million-dollar drones flying blind, commercial planes getting ghost signals, and, maybe, navigation systems pointing pilots at mountains that aren’t there.
The backup system right now is inertial navigation systems. They’re fairly precise accelerometers that track where you’ve been, and they sort of what, but sort of don’t. The problem is that they drift. And the longer you fly without GPS, the worse the error gets: there’s no reset button.
Except, perhaps, quantum navigation.
How quantum navigation works
Earth’s crust has a unique magnetic fingerprint, everywhere you go. Each patch of ground has a slightly different magnetic signature based on the rock composition underneath. This doesn’t change much or rapidly, unless there is significant volcanic activity.
Q-CTRL is using maps that are 40 years old and they still work fine.
Quantum magnetometers — radically more sensitive than anything in your phone — can read those magnetic features in real time and compare what they see against the map. Essentially, they are old-school orienteering with very, very new-school tech.
Remember scouts? You see a hill, a river, a valley. You find it on the map … you sort of know where you are. Except now, with quantum navigation, you’re doing it with invisible fields your eyes can’t detect.
Even better news?
It’s error bounded, always repositioning, and it never drifts.
In fact, it’s 100x more accurate than the best GPS-free alternative currently deployed.
Want a loaf of bread?
A loaf of bread: that’s the current size of the full navigational system: sensor, computer, mounting hardware, everything. The sensor itself is about the size of your pointer finger.
Fourteen months ago this was a quantum physics experiment requiring floating concrete foundations. Now it fits on a medium-sized surveillance drone. and Biercuk told me that what they’ve got in the labs is ever smaller and better.
Impressive!
This is kind of a big deal
Every military on the planet will want unspoofable navigation. Every airline needs something like that. And, at the size of a shoebox or loaf of bread, you can put it on a lot of equipment.
(Depending on price, of course. That’s not public yet.)
Q-CTRL has a public partnership with Airbus, which operates 28,000 aircraft and introduced 793 new planes last year. Then there’s the drone market, where analysts project 2 million Class 2 and Class 3 drones manufactured per year by 2030.
Capture 10% of that market at the right price point and you’re looking at a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.
Impressive!
Full transcript: Unhackable GPS-free navigation
Michael Biercuk:
Just to emphasize how rapidly this has moved, roughly 14 months ago, none of this technology existed. It had not been validated; it had not been tested yet.
John Koetsier:
Everyone thinks quantum equals computing. Guess what? Not always. Q-CTRL is doing something most people haven’t heard of, which is quantum navigation. GPS goes down, it’s spoofed, it’s jammed, or denied—their system keeps on flying. It’s the size of a loaf of bread. It fits on a drone, and it’s 100 times more accurate than the best GPS-free alternative.
My guest today is Michael Biercuk. He’s a CEO and founder of Q-CTRL, and they build AI-powered software infrastructure for quantum technology. But first, real quick: did you think AI was only for digital work? Nope. AI-native manufacturing is here. This month’s sponsor for TechFirst is Apprentice, which offers the first AI agent built from the ground up.
For agentic manufacturing, it connects to all your systems, monitors everything, automates all your processes, but keeps a human in the loop. Check it out at apprentice.io.
Let’s start with the big question. We know about quantum computing and that it’s been around for some time, and there are some crazy advances in it. That looks very, very exciting. Not super familiar with quantum navigation—how does that work?
Michael Biercuk:
Going back to the beginning of the field of quantum technology, there have been a few different vertical applications that people have chased. Clearly, over the last few years, quantum computing—using quantum systems to represent information and process information—that has been peak investor zeitgeist.
But quietly in the background, there were these other approaches. For instance, what’s called quantum sensing—using quantum systems in order to detect things in the environment: magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and the like. What we focused on was a full end-to-end use of a quantum sensor, not just building a widget, but actually building a complete solution.
The approach is to leverage quantum sensors as a new set of eyes to see otherwise invisible features of the Earth, and then use those to navigate, just like you navigate using your eyes and a map. If you go out in the woods and you’re playing orienteering, you can identify a hill, a valley, and a river and say, “Oh, here’s where I am on a map.”
We can do very similar things using quantum sensors and things that we cannot see with our eyes, and that allows us to navigate when GPS is not available.
John Koetsier:
Super interesting. Is that gravitational fields? What are you sensing there? And do you have to pre-map that?
Michael Biercuk:
We build a few different types of technology.
One measures magnetic fields—a very, very sensitive magnetometer, much more sensitive than the traditional things you would have in your phone or in a compass. We also build a gravitational device, and we use these two different things in different domains. The magnetometer is excellent in airborne applications, and the gravimeter is better in maritime applications.
I’m happy to explain why, but our approach is to have full coverage of all the domains.
John Koetsier:
Interesting. Absolutely. Super cool. One thing that you didn’t mention is, do you have to pre-map the Earth to understand different magnetic fields or gravitational strengths so that you can navigate around?
Those aren’t always changing as well?
Michael Biercuk:
The approach we take is called DBRN—database reference navigation—which means we’re comparing against a map. You’re absolutely right: those maps, fortunately, have been built for decades by the geophysics community, by the minerals prospecting community.
People want to know what’s underground, and so they perform geomagnetic surveys or geogravitational surveys. Those are what we use. They’re public domain maps, and of course there are some private ones that we can use as well. Fortunately, these things don’t change very much.
Now, I bet you and your audience have in mind the idea that the Earth’s pole is wandering, and so doesn’t this mean that the magnetic field is changing?
There are really two parts of Earth’s magnetic field. One part comes from the Earth’s core—that’s the thing that points north. That’s what your compass measures, and it’s a pretty big magnetic field. That is the thing that’s wandering around.
But on top of that very big core field are these tiny little bumps and wiggles that come from the composition of Earth’s crust. Those do not change very much. So when we have done our navigational demonstrations, the maps we use are up to 40 years old, and they still work quite well.
John Koetsier:
Wow.
Michael Biercuk:
We’re immune to this pole-wandering phenomenon that has been so challenging in, say, the way airplanes have navigated recently. The landing systems have all been messed up by the North Pole.
We don’t have to deal with that.
John Koetsier:
That’s super fascinating, actually, because that movement has sped up recently, right? It has, and it’s led to some speculation that maybe we’re going to have a pole swap, as we have had in the past—20,000 years ago or something like that.
So you’re immune to that. That’s very cool. And it’s interesting that they’re long-lived. I’m assuming that if a lot of magma moved around, that might change things. But you said crust, so that’s actually not impacted by, let’s say, releasing a lot of magma or something.
Michael Biercuk:
Well, of course, when it becomes lava and then it flows and you have a change in the surface composition, that can have an impact.
But most places are not volcanically active at the level where it matters. And we also just broadly haven’t seen these very big changes in the magnetic susceptibility of Earth’s crust associated with volcanic activity.
John Koetsier:
So this is cool in a lot of different ways. One is that we’ve seen a lot of GPS spoofing, especially in conflict areas—Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, other places like that—where people want to attack others and they want them to not be able to navigate or know where they are or anything like that.
And you’ve said that your quantum nav is 100 times more accurate than other GPS substitutes. How accurate is that?
Michael Biercuk:
Yeah, so we’ve done real-world head-to-head testing. We fly our system on an airplane and we compare against the best like-for-like GPS-free alternative. That technology is very broadly deployed everywhere.
It’s called an inertial navigation system. We use that as the gold standard reference. What we show is that, on average, we do 100 times better in terms of positioning accuracy.
Now, the two ways to think about this that are important are: we achieve the so-called RNP—required navigation performance—that is the aviation standard. So it’s 0.3 nautical miles, a couple of hundred meters on takeoff, landing, approach, and cruise.
That’s way better than what you need for most of the flight, but we meet that aviation standard already in an absolute sense.
But the other thing is that, unlike an inertial navigation system—the conventional backup—which drifts over time, meaning the longer your flight is without GPS, the worse your error becomes, our technology gives what’s called a bounded error. It means it does not get worse over time, because you’re always repositioning yourself relative to the map.
So it’s like you reset to zero every time you perform a successful map-matching exercise.
So those are two very big benefits. And then you can compare against other emerging alt-nav. The important view that we bring is that whatever we’re going to deploy in the field in the future will be multi-mode. There will be multiple approaches brought together.
Ours works over water, it works over land, it works at night, it works with cloud cover, it works with smoke. It works in all these circumstances that are hard for other alt-nav technologies to match.
We think you put them all together, and then you get this exceptionally resilient coverage.
John Koetsier:
Super cool. When you said it works when there’s cloud cover, I had an image of people on an 18th-century sailing ship with an astrolabe or something like that, shooting the sun.
And where are we? Well, taking out a chronometer and—
Michael Biercuk:
It’s a real challenge, right? Because two of the emerging alt-nav technologies—one actually is star cameras—you take a picture of the sky, but guess what? It doesn’t work when it’s cloudy, or it doesn’t work when your altitude is too low, when you’re too close to the ground.
Similarly, if you do visual navigation—so you have a camera on a drone, say—and you do matching to reference pictures that you’ve taken, just like you can look at Google Maps or Google Earth, it works great when visibility is high. It doesn’t work at all over water.
So we provide this piece that plugs a hole in the space of all the different navigational technologies being developed and performs really well.
John Koetsier:
Here’s the interesting thing: anybody who has looked at quantum at all knows that when you’re trying to measure things on a quantum level, you want as vibration-free an environment as possible.
I remember visiting a quantum computing center in Ontario, Canada, probably a decade ago, and they went on and on about pouring the foundation and how expensive it was. This place was vibration-free. You could have a plane crash land outside and you wouldn’t feel it inside—isolated, all this stuff.
You’re putting this on a plane, which is crazy vibrant. You might be putting it on a vehicle—a land vehicle—which hits bumps and potholes and everything like that. Vibration is inherent to the environment.
How do you solve that?
Michael Biercuk:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I was one of those people who built an academic research lab where we had floating concrete slabs disconnected from the rest of the building—all this to try and make a pristine environment.
Excellent for science, very, very important. But ultimately, what we validate in those kinds of environments has to move into the real world.
So what we have focused on at Q-CTRL is how software can be the enabler. As a scientist, a lot of the things you’ll do involve hardware countermeasures. You build a big box around your experiment to exclude acoustic noise or electromagnetic interference—again, great for science, but very heavy, very expensive.
You’re certainly not going to put that on a tiny little drone.
So we have focused on how software can replace those hardware countermeasures—how we can stabilize the system, both in the way we operate it, making it more resilient against interference in the first place, and also in the way that we do the data processing that lets us take out the interference that does creep in.
It’s that combination of things that has made our systems work extremely well in real-world environments and in very, very small form factors. It’s been quite exciting.
John Koetsier:
Super interesting, and a good segue, because you mentioned being on a drone. I was going to ask: what’s the size here?
Is it a suitcase? A briefcase? The size of a phone? What are we talking about?
Michael Biercuk:
The system is already very small. The sensor that we’ve put on a drone is about the size of your pointer finger, a little bit smaller than that. Then it comes with a computer in a ruggedized case that’s a bit bigger than a mobile phone.
The full system—the full navigational system with a lot of commercial off-the-shelf telecom and whatnot that we’ve already put on a drone—the whole thing is about the size of a loaf of bread. Quite small, quite compact. Most of that is just plastic to mount it.
There’s a great pathway forward to make it considerably smaller.
John Koetsier:
A loaf of bread, a quantum system, and a loaf of bread. Wow.
Michael Biercuk:
You should see what we’ve got coming. It’s getting even better than that.
John Koetsier:
I believe it. Once you build, then you iterate, and then you find something better.
What kind of cost are we talking about here? Can you put it on a million different vehicles, or is this something you’re going to put on a high-value thing like a jet?
Michael Biercuk:
Powerful enough to go on commercial aviation platforms with passengers, but small and low-cost enough to go on surveillance drones.
Now, we are primarily targeting what are called class two and class three drones. These are the slightly larger, like two-meter fixed-wing drones that you’ll see out there used to do long-duration surveillance.
It’s not a great fit with the little $500 quadcopters, but it is priced appropriately for those mid-sized drones.
John Koetsier:
Very, very cool. So you’re shipping this right now, if I’m not misunderstanding.
Michael Biercuk:
We are.
John Koetsier:
What kind of volume do you anticipate? Where do you envision this being used?
Michael Biercuk:
We had one of our first commercial sales close just this week, which was very exciting. Quite a number are in procurement right now.
The big opportunities that we see are first in commercial aviation, where we have a public-domain partnership with Airbus, which is a vehicle manufacturer for commercial aviation, but also lots of defense and space technology.
Just for scale, Airbus currently operates 28,000 aircraft around the world, and last year they produced 793 new aircraft. If we just think about what we could deploy in support of that, it’s a huge number.
Then on top of that, when we think about the larger surveillance drones, some analyst reports have suggested that by 2030 there will be 2 million class two and class three drones manufactured per year.
These aren’t the little ones; these are the medium-sized ones. Again, if you just capture 10% of that market at these price points, this is an enormous multi-billion-dollar opportunity.
John Koetsier:
Wow. Are you releasing the name of that customer, commercial client?
Michael Biercuk:
Not yet.
John Koetsier:
Okay. I almost wonder if it’s Airbus, but I won’t pry any farther.
This is super fascinating, super cool, and unexpected for me personally, even just a year ago or a couple of years ago, when all I thought of with quantum was computing. I think there’s so much to build into in terms of sensing as well.
That’s a whole other story that we’ll get to another day, perhaps, but amazing potential here.
Michael Biercuk:
Thanks. And just to emphasize how rapidly this has moved, roughly 14 months ago, none of this technology existed. It had not been validated; it had not been tested yet.
John Koetsier:
And you made a sale of a functioning, shippable product yesterday or last week.
Michael Biercuk:
Yep, that’s right.
John Koetsier:
That’s moving quickly.
Michael Biercuk:
We move very, very fast at Q-CTRL.
John Koetsier:
Very cool. Thank you so much for this time.
Michael Biercuk:
My pleasure. Thank you.