ZaiNar emerges from 9 years of stealth with $100M to power Physical AI using 5G and WiFi instead of GPS

For decades, AI has learned from pixels, text, and clicks. Teaching machines where things are in the physical world has been a different story. After quietly operating for 9 years, ZaiNar is stepping into the public eye with a claim that could reshape how intelligent machines move through real space.

The Belmont, California–based AI startup says it has built a platform that turns existing wireless networks into a continuous spatial-sensing system, providing sub-meter location accuracy without GPS, cameras, or dedicated hardware. Investors have poured more than $100 million into the company, pushing its valuation past $1 billion.

The backers are not casual names. ZaiNar counts Steve Jurvetson, a board member at SpaceX; Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo and a founding partner at AME Cloud Ventures; Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri; Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer at Skype; and Nicholas Pritzker of Tao Capital among its investors. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, serves as an advisor.

Backed by Steve Jurvetson and Jerry Yang, ZaiNar Turns 5G Networks Into the Foundation for Physical AI

ZaiNar is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure for what many are calling “Physical AI,” intelligent systems that move, coordinate, and make decisions in real environments. The idea is simple in theory and stubborn in practice: machines need a live, precise feed of where everything is, continuously updated across warehouses, hospitals, construction sites, cities, and beyond.

“Physical AI needs a live, continuous feed of where everything is, and that dataset simply did not exist,” said Daniel Jacker, CEO and Co-Founder of ZaiNar. “By solving time synchronization at the sub-nanosecond level, we’ve turned existing infrastructure into the foundation layer for Physical AI. This funding accelerates deployment with carrier and enterprise partners globally.”

The company’s technical breakthrough centers on time. Radio waves travel at roughly 30 centimeters per nanosecond. If a network can synchronize signals to sub-nanosecond precision, that timing directly translates into sub-meter positioning accuracy. ZaiNar says it has achieved synchronization thousands of times more precise than conventional network time protocols, allowing it to compute location from the radio signals already moving through 5G, WiFi, and private cellular networks.

That approach sidesteps the usual tradeoffs. GPS struggles indoors and in dense urban settings. Cameras require a line of sight and heavy compute. Ultra-wideband systems demand specialized hardware installed across facilities at high cost. ZaiNar claims it works with infrastructure that is already deployed globally, turning sunk investment in wireless networks into a new sensing layer.

“ZaiNar has solved a problem that’s stymied the industry for decades,” said Steve Jurvetson, Board Member, ZaiNar; Board Member, SpaceX. “Precise positioning without dedicated hardware infrastructure opens markets that were previously inaccessible.”

The commercial pitch is grounded in real deployments. ZaiNar says its system is already operating in healthcare, construction, smart cities, and industrial environments. In hospitals, it helps teams locate medical equipment in real time. On construction sites, it can flag when workers move into hazard zones. In logistics and fulfillment centers, it coordinates autonomous systems with tighter spatial awareness.

Dr. Andreas Weigend sees the implications from an operator’s standpoint. “Whether in a hospital, on a construction site, or in a fulfillment center, knowing precisely where things are is crucial for making good decisions,” said Dr. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon. “I wish something like ZaiNar had existed when I was at Amazon: Not only would it have changed how we operated, but also where we set the bar.”

The company has filed more than 100 patents and says 90 have been issued with zero rejections, covering phase-based time synchronization and network-computed positioning. In radio frequency engineering, a field that has matured over decades, that level of IP allowance stands out. ZaiNar has secured over $450 million in contracts and memoranda of understanding, with carrier and enterprise partnerships expected to be announced soon.

Beyond location, the implications extend into network performance and defense. Data centers rely on buffer gaps between packets to prevent collisions. More precise synchronization could shrink those gaps and increase throughput without adding bandwidth or power. Military and aerospace systems lean heavily on GPS, which can be jammed or spoofed. ZaiNar’s terrestrial method, built on existing cellular and WiFi signals, offers a different layer of resilience.

“ZaiNar is building essential infrastructure for the next computing paradigm,” said Jerry Yang, founding partner, AME Cloud Ventures, and co-founder, Yahoo!

Founded in 2017, ZaiNar has operated quietly while building its core technology. Now, with capital in place and commercial traction underway, the company is betting that Physical AI will not be limited by algorithms or models, but by whether machines know where they are. If that thesis holds, the most valuable AI breakthroughs ahead may start with time, measured down to the nanosecond.