Advanced Navigation America is expanding its U.S. manufacturing operations in Huntsville with a new center focused on developing and producing advanced navigation technology for defense, space and other autonomous systems.

The company announced plans for a Positioning, Navigation and Timing Center of Excellence in Huntsville, where it says it will research, develop and manufacture technologies designed to keep aircraft, spacecraft, autonomous vehicles and other systems operating when GPS is unavailable, degraded or denied.

The expansion is backed by Advanced Navigation’s recently announced $110 million Series C funding round. The company did not disclose in its announcement how much of that investment will go toward the Huntsville facility, the size or location of the center, a construction timeline or the number of jobs expected to be created.

Advanced Navigation America President Mike Cohen said Huntsville puts the company’s engineering and manufacturing capabilities closer to many of the customers that rely on the technology.

“Resilient navigation is becoming the backbone of the autonomy shaping the future of defense, space, marine, mining and heavy industry,” Cohen said. “The challenge for America is making sure the industrial base can produce these vital technologies as quickly and reliably as demand is growing. That is the gap we are addressing in Huntsville: bringing high-performance manufacturing, faster delivery and missionization closer to the customers and industries that depend on it.”

The Huntsville center is expected to work across fiber optics, microelectromechanical systems, laser sensing, photonics, vision-based systems, artificial intelligence and quantum sensing.

Among the technologies Advanced Navigation produces are fiber optic gyroscopes, or FOGs, highly precise sensors that can help a system determine its position and movement without relying on GPS. The company said it is one of a limited number of companies capable of producing strategic-grade FOGs and laser velocity sensors at scale.

“With technology this precise, you can’t separate engineering from manufacturing,” said Chuck Matheny, vice president of U.S. operations at Advanced Navigation America. “Production, calibration and validation all have to work together. Bringing those capabilities under one roof gives us control from the sensor through to the finished system.”

For Advanced Navigation, Huntsville’s appeal is closely tied to the concentration of defense, space and engineering work surrounding Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Cummings Research Park.

“Huntsville has spent generations turning hard science into American capability,” Cohen said. “We’re putting the people who build and missionize this technology within minutes of our customers, changing how quickly we understand a requirement, solve it and deploy it into the field.”

Advanced Navigation was founded in Australia and develops navigation and autonomous systems used across land, air, sea and space. The company says more than 100,000 of its systems have been deployed globally, with customers including Anduril, NOAA, Leonardo, Rheinmetall, BHP and Intuitive Machines.

The Huntsville operation will become a major U.S. manufacturing location alongside the company’s operations in Australia and the United Kingdom. Advanced Navigation said the three-country footprint will expand production capacity and provide additional supply-chain redundancy.

The company also plans to use its new funding to accelerate U.S. acquisitions of complementary technologies and grow its American workforce.

“The challenge isn’t simply inventing better technology,” Cohen said. “It’s being able to manufacture it reliably, at scale, and get it into the hands of our customers in weeks rather than years. That is what we’re building in Huntsville.”

Advanced Navigation has not yet provided several details that will determine the size of the project’s economic impact in North Alabama, including the Huntsville site’s location, square footage, capital investment and anticipated employment.

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