Secretive ZaiNar Exits Shadows, Targets $5 Billion in Deals for GPS Alternative
ZaiNar says it has developed innovative, ultraprecise tracking tech that will teach robots to see and help power the physical AI era. It will also freak out everyone who worries about digital privacy.
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Jacker, CEO and co-founder of ZaiNar, made me an alluring offer: Would I like to see the first-ever public demonstration of the technology his startup had spent nine years laboriously developing in anonymity? He described it as the most accurate location-tracking tech on the planet, capable of pinpointing an object’s whereabouts within inches—indoors and outdoors—from a great distance away. Sure, Google Maps and Apple’s Find My feature are pretty terrific, but even in the best cases, they typically can only determine someone’s location to within dozens of feet and sometimes can’t find a device’s location at all if it’s inside or underground.
I knew Jacker had lined up a cadre of major investors, including Steve Jurvetson and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and had revealed the startup’s existence in February by announcing they’d valued the company at $1 billion.
I couldn’t possibly turn him down.
So Jacker, 37, and I met at a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in Belmont, Calif., previously occupied by GoPro. When we entered a ground-floor room divided by thick walls and cluttered with metal racks, Jacker handed a smartphone to one of his engineers, whom he’d enlisted to help with the demo. The device was connected to a 5G network through four antennas installed on the walls. It should’ve been very difficult to pinpoint its exact location without adding specialized equipment to the device or the room; plus, the warehouse’s interior metal roof would’ve made traditional GPS tracking challenging. But on a laptop monitor, ZaiNar software showed it as a tiny blue dot on a map of the warehouse floor.
As the engineer began to walk around with it, I kept waiting for the blue dot to disappear—or perhaps lag behind his movements. It never did, not even when he slipped into a narrow hallway between two anechoic chambers—rooms that use special tiles and foam to block out sound, satellite connections and wireless internet.
Jacker said his technology can track any phone, car, drone or robot in almost any environment as long as it’s roughly within a mile of a 5G base station, antenna or other network receiver. The one exception: He and his four co-founders haven’t yet figured out how to make it work underwater. He framed his company’s technology in cinematic terms: “We know where everything, everywhere, all at once is.”
Jacker sees the startup’s tech as an alternative to GPS-based tracking. Every device that can connect to wireless internet, like Wi-Fi and 5G, sends out radio signals to stay on the network. Zainar’s software uses those signals to track a device’s location within 4 inches, according to Jacker. The software works indoors using private Wi-Fi and 5G and outdoors using 5G networks operated by mobile carriers.
The concept of using radio signals for more precise location tracking has been kicking around university labs and Menlo Park skunkworks for years, but no other startup has come up with software that can actually analyze and correctly, precisely interpret the signals without requiring expensive, cumbersome hardware on a device or in the surrounding environment, Jacker said. The startup has benefited by closely studying the subtle variations of radio waves, giving it a better understanding of how long it takes for a signal to travel from a device to the network. That sense of timing is then used to help assess a device’s location.
ZaiNar’s technology uses a specific signal transmitted through radio waves called a sounding reference signal, long part of wireless technology. A device can send out this signal as much as 500 times a second, and since it transmits so frequently, it’s useful for tracking a moving device, like a drone or a robot. Apple recently added a feature that allows users to limit the precision of location data shared with cellular carriers. However, device makers like Apple and Google cannot prevent their devices from emitting the radio signals ZaiNar is analyzing, Jacker said, which means its technology could constantly monitor them anytime they’re connected to a network.
The startup already has $500 million in signed contracts and nonbinding commitments, according to Jacker, and is currently negotiating another $5 billion in deals. ZaiNar has two sets of customers: First, it sells software to mobile carriers, who use it to sell location-based data. The city of Tokyo, for instance, is studying traffic patterns and congestion by buying data that multiple mobile carriers gleaned using ZaiNar’s technology. How do they obtain the data? Both the cars on the roads and the smartphones pedestrians carry emit the signals ZaiNar’s software relies on. (Jacker wouldn’t say which mobile carriers are currently working with his startup.)
Second, Zainar also sells its software to private companies that want to monitor 5G-connected hardware like phones, drones and certain construction equipment. And its investors are betting the startup will win a pile of business from all the companies currently rushing to manufacture robots, as well as the customers who want to put those robots to use.
For the robotics boom to fully take off, robots need to have an acute sense of their whereabouts. But right now, most robots are pretty dumb when it comes to moving around. ZaiNar’s technology could improve how they see and move, said Ajay Ramachandran, an investor in ZaiNar through his San Francisco–based firm, ifMagic Ventures. “From robots to various kinds of drones to Waymos, they’re all going to benefit from this very precise location signal,” he said.
The startup has already struck deals with AI companies building world models, which simulate real-world environments to train autonomous systems like robots and self-driving cars before they’re let loose in the physical world. Those AI businesses see the location data ZaiNar has accumulated through its mobile carrier partnerships as valuable in training their models. In the past two weeks alone, ZaiNar signed more than $30 million in contracts to supply such data to companies developing world models, Jacker said.
“If you believe that physical AI is going to be a $50 trillion or $100 trillion [opportunity],” said Ramachandran, “this becomes a major opportunity from ZaiNar’s vantage point.”
But not everyone is so enthusiastic. Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, a London-based watchdog focused on digital surveillance and data abuses, argued that ZaiNar’s technology is ripe for misuse. “Tech like this moves surveillance decisions to the network,” he said, adding that network providers like cell carriers have a bad track record with user privacy.
“Governments and ad tech firms alike relish that opportunity for exploitation,” he said. “People do not.”
ZaiNar’s story began as many Silicon Valley tales do: with a chance meeting on the palm tree–lined campus of Stanford University. Jacker, a Chicago-area native, arrived there in 2016 for an MBA after trying to build a 3D-printing startup and spending time as an Accenture consultant.
During Jacker’s first semester, he met Philip Kratz, an applied physics doctoral student who ran Stanford’s student radio engineering club. The pair were both in Design Garage, a popular design school class that drew people from many different disciplines. They began talking about Kratz’s theory that advancements in radio technology offered a new way to analyze radio signals and accurately determine the precise location of devices like phones and cars. Together, they hatched a plan: Kratz would handle the science behind the technology; Jacker would work on commercializing it.
In an initial test of the idea, they placed a 4G antenna on a concrete wall bordering Campus Drive, the road that loops through campus. As each car drove by, they found they could detect it through the wall using the radio signal emitted by the car’s tire pressure sensor. It was an early validation of their theory. In another test, they tried to locate devices using wireless signals in the Stanford Business School garage and found their technique worked in that environment as well.
These experiments soon caught the attention of two of Jacker’s MBA classmates, Jack Levy and Eric Roselli, who joined up with him and Kratz. (Today Kratz is ZaiNar’s chief technology officer, and Levy is chief operating officer. Roselli is head of defense—exploring how the technology could be used for national security and potentially in war.) Next, Jacker recruited Alexander Hooshmand as a fifth co-founder. A Stanford guest lecturer, Hooshmand had recently sold data company BlueKai, which he co-founded, to Oracle for $400 million. Jacker made the overture amid a crowd of people who had stayed to speak to Hooshman after a class.
“There was a line of people waiting, but Danny was the only one I followed up with,” Hooshmand recalled. “It immediately occurred to me that if what they were describing worked, it would be incredibly powerful.”
The idea was good, but the founders still had to actually make the technology work. Over the decades, there have been many attempts to crack the challenging problem of tracking the location of objects inside buildings where satellite signals struggle to penetrate, said Fadel Adib, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab and a co-founder of Cartesian Systems, which has developed its own wireless tracking technology for retail stores to monitor inventory but isn’t a direct ZaiNar competitor.
Many of those efforts have failed for one key reason: Researchers in labs have claimed to have made breakthroughs, but “when you take them into the real world, something changes,” said Adib, blaming real-world obstacles that distort radio waves, like metal, doors and walls. Adib remains skeptical that ZaiNar’s technology can perform exactly as Jacker describes it—particularly when it comes to tracking things indoors—though he noted that he hasn’t tried the tech himself.
Jeff Depew, board president of Sand Hill Angels, a Bay Area–based firm that invested in ZaiNar in 2017, said other entrepreneurs interested in the technology lacked the patience to spend years perfecting it. Depew said he had previously mentored the founders of a similar startup also started by Stanford graduates, WiFiSlam. Even though they were in talks to do a big deal with Procter & Gamble, they still sold their business to Apple after just two years—for about $20 million.
Depew sees how the young founders, who wanted to cash out quickly, saw it as a “great outcome,” he said. “But they walked away from something that was really going to be transformational.”
ZaiNar, on the other hand, has taken a longer-term approach, he argued. “They were focused on doing it—from my perspective—the right way rather than the fast way.”
After ZaiNar’s founders graduated from Stanford, they quietly raised $5 million from investors including Yang, who became an early adviser, while deliberately trying to avoid any media attention. Jacker said none of the five founders had ever taken any money out of the business through secondary share sales. “We’re so bullish on what we’re doing,” he said.
After graduating, the ZaiNar founders worked out of Kratz’s three-bedroom home in Redwood City, Calif., and kept testing their technology in as many places as possible, including in Kratz’s living room and at a nearby indoor volleyball gym. To use the gym, they offered engineering classes to the high school students who played there. “Literally imagine us setting up different tripods and radios as there’s the high school volley teams trying to spike balls at us and knock things over,” Jacker said.
In 2019, ZaiNar ran its first test at a live construction site, the type of busy environment the founders hoped their tech would eventually get used in. In the years since, they’ve deployed their technology in a range of challenging locales, including a large California hospital system, a rail station in Japan and a million-square-foot fulfillment center in Michigan owned by a large online retailer, whose identity Jacker wouldn’t reveal.
ZaiNar was close to finally coming out of stealth mode in 2024 with a product focused just on tracking via Wi-Fi. But Jacker and his co-founders decided to wait a little longer and make a product that could also track via 5G. Moreover, they wanted to wait for enthusiasm about physical AI—robots, drones and autonomous vehicles—to intensify, figuring the companies making those products would be very eager to use its location-tracking technology.
“We wanted to create as big a moat as possible, so we could go in and really own the market,” Jacker said. “It was deliberate—but at times frustrating—not being able to tell the world what we were doing.”
Steve Jurvetson, a longtime VC fixture who has backed everything from SpaceX to Hotmail, is a ZaiNar investor and a major cheerleader for its technology, which he has described nothing less than “extraordinary.” (Getty Images)
Today Jacker and his co-founders hope their portfolio of 96 patents gives them a sturdy defense against any rivals. Still, they do have some giant competitors. In January, Ericsson, the massive Swedish telecom, unveiled a new 5G location-tracking technology, which the company says can track objects indoors within about 3 feet and outdoors within 4 inches. Huawei, Nokia and Qualcomm also all have their own offerings.
One way ZaiNar is bringing its technology to market is through a partnership with a large European consulting firm that helps large enterprises like infrastructure company Siemens and oil producer Saudi Aramco build private 5G networks. A senior data and AI executive at the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss the relationship with ZaiNar more freely, said it now offers ZaiNar’s location-tracking system as an add-on when deploying 5G infrastructure.
The executive described the relationship as a “win-win,” as the technology helps the consulting firm differentiate itself from competitors. They said its internal testing of ZaiNar’s technology in November produced strong results. The firm is now working on a pilot deployment at a site owned by an industrial conglomerate. If successful, the firm could expand the technology to hundreds of the conglomerate’s other sites.
At ZaiNar’s Belmont warehouse, I couldn’t help but feel a little disturbed as I watched the blue dot weave across that laptop screen. Sure, the technology was impressive, but the little dot represented a person. And we, as people, already exist in a world where our digital privacy has been steadily eroded for decades. ZaiNar’s technology could undermine it even further, leading to more intrusive forms of marketing, government surveillance and other possible abuses.
Since ZaiNar’s technology can granularly track a device’s movement using the signals a device broadcasts to stay online, it makes permissionless tracking very easy. (A user can’t turn off this type of location tracking the way they can other location services on a smartphone, though they could evade detection by putting their devices in airplane mode.) ZaiNar sees this as a major corporate selling point, and while I was reporting this story, a spokesperson for the startup described tracking items like phones and cars “without cooperation from those devices” as a large part of the company’s “key IP moat.”
When I pressed Jacker about the dystopian elements of his technology, he argued that the U.S. government already very tightly regulates the activities of mobile carriers, making them safer than some “random app” that isn’t watched as closely. He also emphasized that the location data is anonymized, though Hosein with Privacy International argued that one could identify it by, for example, cross-referencing it with CCTV footage.
And the telecoms don’t have squeaky-clean records when it comes to privacy. AT&T and Verizon, for instance, are still battling a more than $100 million combined fine dating back to a 2020 investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, which accused them of mishandling customer data in a previous effort to track and sell cellphone users’ locations to third parties.
One of the buzziest recent debuts in robotics came last year when 1X, a then little-known Palo Alto startup, said its Neo humanoid would be available in homes by 2026. (Getty Images)
Jacker said he has firm boundaries for his technology’s use. The company does not do deals in Russia and China and does not integrate with Chinese firms such as Huawei or ZTE, both of which the U.S. has identified as national security threats because of their connections to the Chinese military. But what about an organization like the U.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Jacker said he wouldn’t ever allow the federal agency to, for instance, use ZaiNar’s tracking for immigration raids.
“That’s crossing a line for us,” said Jacker, saying it would be “too Holocausty” to consider. But he could see ICE using ZaiNar technology for other operations.
“But border security? Totally fine,” he said.
As ZaiNar’s technology more fully enters the public spotlight, Depew, the ZaiNar investor, predicts questions around privacy will become more front of mind for people in the U.S. Depew said he would ideally like there to be an opt-in feature for users (though because of how the location tracking works, this doesn’t seem possible). Depew, an iPhone owner, brought up Apple as an example.
“It knows where I am, but I also know that they’re keeping it within the walled garden and not sharing it with everybody and so advertisers aren’t able to come after me without my inviting them in,” he said, adding that ZaiNar’s technology “allows you to do that on steroids.”
Jacker casts the dilemma I pointed out to him as just an example of an age-old problem. The internet, for example, has been transformative, but it also enables harm. “On the web, do terrorists communicate? Of course. And can you build a bomb online? Yes.”
Any powerful technology has good and bad uses,” he continued. “The question is, can you do your best to protect it so it’s used in a way that is a net positive?”
