Anti-jamming solutions leader infiniDome has received $9M in Series A funding from Hanwha Aerospace, Honeywell Ventures, and Next Gear Ventures. According to infiniDome, the funding will support the deployment the company’s GPSdome2 system to major defense clients, including US Department of Defense, Israeli Defense prime, South Korean Army (ROK armed forces), and Indian armed forces. The funding also has important implications for commercial drone operators seeking to mitigate risks, particularly around BVLOS flights.

“Both with Hanwha Aerospace and with Honeywell’s support, infiniDome’s plan is to deploy its systems to provide revolutionary protection to UAVs in defense today and jointly develop protection solutions for the AAM space tomorrow enabling the safe future of unmanned and autonomous aviation,” Omer Sharar, CEO of infiniDome, told Commercial UAV News.

“This round of investment will allow infiniDome to strengthen its R&D, Product, Operations and Customer Support team,” Sharar stated. “And it will enable scaling of manufacturing sufficiently to be able to deploy our GPSdome2 products to strategic customers across the globe.”

The funding will support infiniDome’s deployment of its latest anti-jamming technology, GPSdome2. “After almost four years of development, infiniDome’s newest product, GPSdome2, is hitting the market and making massive waves,” Sharar reported. GPSdome2, he said, offers protection for small to medium platforms and provides advanced solutions for protecting GPS systems in crewed and uncrewed applications to ensure accurate and continuous positioning and navigation data, even in heavily challenged GNSS environments.

The implications of this technology for all UAV-related operations are significant, Sharar asserted. “Commercial and defense UAVs use GNSS to get from point A to point B, but GNSS is the weakest signal we use today. To jam it, all one has to do is transmit something, anything, a bit more powerful at the same, well known, frequency,” he explained. “Any and all BVLOS capabilities are completely impaired when GNSS is compromised.”

Sharar said that “there are solutions today that enable alternative sensors to GNSS, such as video-based nav, lidar, IR and others, but the problem is that these solutions sometime don’t work when vision is impaired due to weather, darkness, flying over unmapped areas, etc. That’s when these solutions come back to depend on unprotected GNSS.” 

To address these issues, infiniDome created a solution that “protects that very weak GNSS signal by making it about 20x-100x more resilient to any and all types of jamming attacks.” Working with partners such as Honeywell, Sharar said “infiniDome today offers a ‘Resilient Nav Suite,’ which fuses data from multiple sensors – Inertial, Radar and protected GNSS to create a solution made of ‘Layers of Resiliency’ which allow any UAV in a critical mission to complete its tasks, not only in GNSS challenged environments – but even in fully denied environments.” The solution has proven effective with clients working in defense and commercial operations.

Looking ahead, Sharar reported that the company is looking to develop new and better anti-jamming systems. “This round of funding will enable infiniDome to test the waters of a new solution it has been cooking, a bit like a skunkworks project—GPSensors and infiniCloud—a GNSS integrity and attack monitoring solution for UAV operators,” he said. “These systems would enable safe BVLOS trials and operations, safe vertiports operations, critical infrastructure monitoring, and even border patrol monitoring solutions.”