After raising over $150 million, deep tech unicorn Advanced Navigation is expanding internationally with a manufacturing plant in Alabama and upcoming acquisitions across the US and Europe.
Advanced Navigation will open its first US manufacturing hub in September as part of an international expansion funded by its March $158 million Series C, which cemented it as a rare deep tech unicorn.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Shaw said the company will move into Huntsville, Alabama, plant in the coming weeks, with engineering work to begin there later in the year before manufacturing proper starts around January.
“The US is about 40 per cent of our business from a revenue perspective,” Shaw told Forbes Australia. “Our goal is that around 12 to 18 months from now [the plant is] able to manufacture at least half of what we’re selling in the US.”
The startup already had a sales and support team in the States, but the Alabama factory will add both engineering and manufacturing to its US operations. The company in February hired Mike Cohen, a former VP at NASA contractor Sierra Lobo, to preside over US business. Advanced Navigation is looking to follow this blueprint in the UK and Europe, Shaw said.
The startup develops hardware and software that allows vehicles and machines to navigate without GPS. That makes it helpful for organisations who need to navigate in space (NASA) or in deep underground mines (BHP), or on battlefields where enemies use GPS-jamming technology to blind drones and tanks. The startup counts Main Sequence, Airtree, Malcolm Turnbull and private equity giant KKR as backers.
Though Australia’s VC sector has proven capable of producing companies that can thrive selling software around the world (think Canva, CultureAmp and SafetyCulture), there are fewer examples of globally successful “deep tech” startups that commercialise cutting-edge science and engineering.
That is beginning to change, however. Advanced Navigation, rocket company Gilmour Space Technologies and climate tech startup Neara both announced valuations at over $1 billion this year, while the likes of quantum startups Diraq and SQC and Morse Micro have all attracted significant overseas capital.
“In private investment and public investment, people are liking businesses where there’s a lot of defensibility,” Shaw said. “In a hardware manufacturing business there’s so much secret sauce and know-how, just in how to build the product, that AI is never going to be able to replace.”
International manufacturing is not the only activity funded by Advanced Navigation’s $158 million Series C. The company is also looking to expand its international footprint via acquiring smaller companies in the US and Europe. Shaw said he’s in talks with around 20 of them, almost all with between 10 and 50 employees.
Such deals are just the beginning of Advanced Navigation’s M&A ambitions, and Shaw said he has intentions of listing Advanced Navigation in the coming years in large part to facilitate bigger acquisitions.
“That is somewhere we definitely want to go in the next few years,” Shaw said of a listing. “We have investors we’ve got to offer liquidity to at some point… and as we do more [M&A] we might need more capital to accelerate that. That’s a good reason potentially to go to public markets to raise. Doing M&A as a public company is often easier.”
Advanced Navigation’s March Series C included a $50 million investment from the National Reconstruction Fund, a $15 billion Australian Government fund seeking to stimulate advanced manufacturing in the country. While having manufacturing in Alabama will allow Advanced Navigation to win over customers who require parts to be built in the US, Shaw said Australia will remain the company’s main building hub.
“We still have to grow our manufacturing a lot in Australia,” Shaw said. “Because we’ve got fairly exponential growth, if we try and do everything in Australia we’re just not going to be able to hit the numbers we need to hit… later this year we’ll probably make some announcements about expanding manufacturing in Australia as well, it’s just the US has to come before that.”
A financial report lodged with ASIC revealed Advanced Navigation’s revenue for the 12 months ending June 30, 2025 hit $57.7 million, a 73 per cent rise from the $33.3 million generated the previous financial year. It reduced its net loss by over 50 per cent, from $31.5 million to $14.3 million.
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