The international program will accelerate R&D and expand use-cases for SandboxAQ’s award-winning, dual-use AQNav magnetic anomaly navigation system
Palo Alto, CA – SandboxAQ today announced it was selected by NATO to participate in the 2025 Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) cohort – one of approximately 70 innovative companies chosen from more than 2,600 submissions across 32 NATO countries. NATO DIANA unites companies worldwide to leverage dual-use technologies that address critical solutions in energy and power, sensing and surveillance, secure information sharing, human health and performance, and critical infrastructure and logistics.
Established by NATO in 2023, DIANA seeks to tackle complex societal challenges by bringing together innovative companies developing disruptive, dual-use technologies (i.e., commercial and defence) that could solve key needs for the Alliance. As part of the cohort’s Sensing & Surveillance group, DIANA will accelerate R&D and expand use-cases for SandboxAQ’s award-winning AQNav magnetic navigation system, which is currently being tested by the U.S. Air Force, Acubed (the Silicon Valley innovation center of Airbus), Boeing, and a U.S. allied government. Pairing with DIANA’s network of experts in technology, commercial development and defence, SandboxAQ will receive resources, insights, developmental support, and opportunities to test AQNav in a variety of specialized environments.
“The daily occurrence of GPS jamming and spoofing in key regions of the world underpins the urgency to deploy innovative technologies like AQNav for both commercial and defence use cases to better protect our skies. By supplementing the onboard systems of aircraft, AQNav provides a secure navigation alternative and serves as an additional key safeguard,” said Luca Ferrara, General Manager of Navigation Solutions at SandboxAQ. “We’re incredibly proud to have been selected for the 2025 DIANA cohort, and are looking forward to a strategic collaboration with NATO to further extend the commercial and defence capabilities of AQNav.”
AQNav is a breakthrough navigation technology that leverages SandboxAQ’s proprietary Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), quantum sensors, and the Earth’s crustal magnetic field. Together, they provide an all-weather, day/night, terrain-agnostic, real-time navigation solution for military and commercial applications that is nearly impossible to jam or spoof. AQNav does not rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which enables worldwide availability and application across all domains, including air, land, and sea.
To date, AQNav has logged more than 200 hours of flight tests with the U.S. Air Force (USAF), participating in more than 40 sorties – including two large-scale military exercises and other real-world flight tests – over various geographies and in four aircraft types. In July 2024, AQNav successfully showcased its ability to serve as a primary navigation source. It also showed its future potential to calibrate once and scale across similar aircraft types without individual aircraft calibration – both of which are essential to deploy AQNav across large fleets of aircraft.
Last year, the USAF awarded SandboxAQ a coveted TACFI contract extension to explore additional AQNav configurations across a broader range of aircraft. Acubed also extended its SandboxAQ contract to further explore AQNav applications in commercial aviation.
For these milestones and other successes, AQNav received recognition as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024, Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech, and other prestigious awards.
About SandboxAQ
SandboxAQ is a B2B company delivering solutions at the intersection of AI and quantum techniques. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) deliver critical advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, and other sectors. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent growth-backed company funded by leading investors including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., IQT, US Innovative Technology Fund, S32, Eric Schmidt, Breyer Capital, Marc Benioff, Thomas Tull, Paladin Capital Group, and others. For more information, visit http://www.sandboxaq.com.
