By: Dawn Zoldi
Navigation can no longer sit at the edge of platform design. According to Dr. Mario Paniccia, CEO and Co-Founder of Santa Clara-based ANELLO Photonics, which builds GPS-denied navigation around its Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope, or SiPhOG™, for defense and autonomous vehicle platforms, “The entire world has been based on GPS. Jamming and spoofing is happening. Everything that relies on GPS doesn’t work anymore.” So what can you do to ensure mission accomplishment, even when the satellite signal disappears, lies or gets drowned out? Read on to find out.
Built by a Team That Has Shipped at Scale
Paniccia brings a rare technical lineage to autonomy. He spent 22 years at Intel, became an Intel Fellow and helped build silicon photonics, which uses semiconductor manufacturing techniques to create optical devices at scale.
He described silicon photonics in practical terms. Data centers moved from copper to fiber because light moves information fast and efficiently. ANELLO applies that same manufacturing logic to gyroscopes by shrinking fighter-aircraft and submarine-class precision into a manufacturable integrated circuit for autonomy. That matters because defense systems now need small, rugged navigation for attritable aircraft, unmanned surface vessels, underwater vehicles, ground robots and eventually man-portable systems.
Paniccia also made clear that ANELLO’s edge is not just its chip. It is the team behind it. He described a seasoned Silicon Valley staff with deep photonics, electronics, algorithm and manufacturing experience, including roughly 14 PhDs and leaders who have shipped optical devices at massive commercial volumes. “The key to success is hiring people smarter than you,” he said. With the new funding and momentum, ANELLO is adding manufacturing engineers, product engineers, supply chain talent and applications specialists to turn validated technology into repeatable production. Paniccia summed up ANELLO’s ambitions plainly. His company aims to become “the core navigation solution for anything that moves.”
The SiPhOG Advantage: Small SWaP-C Fiber-Gyro Precision
Paniccia demystified the gyroscope. MEMS gyros power phones, watches and earbuds, but they drift too much for high-consequence navigation. Traditional fiber optic gyros offer far better precision, but they tend to be large, expensive and hard to fit into small autonomous systems.
ANELLO’s answer is the SiPhOG. Its system is only slightly bigger than a postage stamp, with a photonic chip roughly two millimeters by five millimeters inside. “We’ve taken the concept of a fiber gyro, big, bulky but gold standard, and we’ve shrunk it,” he said.
That shrink changes the deployment model. Smaller SWaP-C footprints open air, maritime and ground platforms that cannot carry legacy navigation hardware. ANELLO’s Aerial INS, for example, uses three-axis SiPhOG optical gyros, dual triple-frequency all-constellation GNSS receivers, PX4 and ArduPilot drivers, standard interfaces and spoofing detection for BVLOS UAS, ISR aircraft, heavy-lift drones, cargo drones and VTOL platforms.
Jamming, Spoofing and the New Normal
GPS jamming blasts radio-frequency interference until a receiver loses usable satellite signals. Spoofing feeds a receiver false location data while making the system believe the signal remains valid.
Paniccia emphasized that these threats now affect both military and commercial users. Ukraine exposed the operational reality, but the problem has spread to the Middle East, commercial aviation, urban canyons, tunnels and infrastructure-heavy environments. “Jamming and spoofing is everywhere,” he said.
For small drones, failure can be brutal. A UAV may hover, fail to return home, drift or crash. ANELLO’s role is to detect the failure, alert the system and carry navigation through the denied region. “Put it over to ANELLO,” he said, “and now navigate with ANELLO.”
Land, Air, Sea and the Rise of Mission-Tuned INS
ANELLO’s portfolio spans land, air and sea. Its ground product supports industrial vehicles, its maritime product uses sealed packaging for unmanned surface and underwater platforms, and its aerial system trims weight for drones and aircraft.
The Aerial INS, launched at CES 2026, targets BVLOS, shipborne VTOL UAS, ISR aircraft, heavy-lift drones and cargo drones. ANELLO says it delivers greater than 98% navigation accuracy without cameras or fiber-optic cables while maintaining less than 0.5 degrees per hour unaided heading drift.
“Cameras are great,” Paniccia said. “But they don’t work over water.” They also struggle over clouds, snow, sand and featureless terrain. Autonomous logistics, ship-to-ship resupply, mine countermeasure support and contested ISR all demand navigation that does not depend on visible features or a clean satellite link.
AI That Operators Do Not Have to See
NELLO uses AI and algorithms to compare sensors, detect divergence, optimize weighting and tune performance to platform behavior. Paniccia described roughly 34 sensors inside one aerial unit, including gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers, barometers and temperature sensors. Every 10 milliseconds, ANELLO compares its estimate against GPS. When the two diverge, the system can flag spoofing and transition away from the suspect signal.
The company also applies what Paniccia called a “white glove approach.” When customers integrate ANELLO hardware, the team can collect data, tune algorithms and send updated software back for another test. In two or three days, he said, a customer can move from integration to performance.
Funding, APFIT and the Scaling Test
ANELLO recently announced a $25 million Series B-2 round in May 2026 to accelerate production and deployment of resilient navigation for autonomous systems across land, air and sea. The same announcement described ANELLO’s portfolio as spanning more than 80 issued or pending patents, including an AI-based sensor fusion engine.
Earlier this year, ANELLO also received a $20 million Department of War APFIT award to fast-track procurement, production and scaling of its GPS-denied navigation technology. APFIT aims to move mature technologies into fielding at scale, and ANELLO tied the award to work with Navy and Marine Corps partners. The company also received the Naval Technology Excellence Award.
Paniccia’s interpretation was simple. The money validates the technology, but it also raises the bar. “It’s all about scaling now,” he said. The company is hiring manufacturing, product, supply chain and applications talent while preparing for demand that grows as GPS denial becomes an operational requirement rather than an edge case.
Strategic Collaborations Point to Layered Navigation
ANELLO’s recent partnerships show where resilient navigation may go next. Its Q-CTRL collaboration combines ANELLO’s SiPhOG inertial technology with Ironstone Opal quantum magnetic navigation for UAVs when GPS is degraded, jammed or unavailable. The companies describe a multi-layered Quantum Navigation Solution that can deliver bounded positioning estimates without degrading with mission duration.
The Mythos AI collaboration takes the same logic to maritime autonomy. ANELLO and Mythos AI plan plug-and-play GPS-denied navigation by combining SiPhOG-based inertial navigation, sensor fusion and AI-driven collaborative autonomy in an open architecture for defense, commercial and hybrid maritime operations.
These collaborations reinforce that the future will not depend on layered, validated, mission-tuned architectures.
What The Dual-Use Autonomy Community Should Take Away
For defense stakeholders, program managers, range operators, primes, startups and autonomy teams chasing Department of War demand, the lesson is: do not bolt GPS-denied capability on at the end. “You need to be thinking about having GPS-denied capability from the beginning,” Paniccia emphasized.
Teams that want to succeed in defense should bring real platforms, real dynamics and real failure modes to the table. They should test over water, in degraded signals, across BVLOS profiles, through high-dynamics flight, with wind and current inputs, and against spoofing logic. They should plan for production because defense buyers increasingly ask whether a company can scale, not merely whether it can demo.
Disrupt Yourself Before the Signal Disappears
Paniccia a one-line that should stick with every autonomy builder: “You have to disrupt yourself.” For ANELLO, that means shrinking the device, improving algorithms, scaling production and pushing SiPhOG-based navigation into more platforms before the market forces the issue.
For the wider defense autonomy ecosystem, it means accepting that precision navigation has moved from nice-to-have to mission-critical. GPS will still matter, but contested autonomy needs a resilient architecture underneath it.
Across land, air and sea, ANELLO Photonics is betting that autonomy end-users will reward systems that know where they are even when the world tries to make them lose their way.