California-based ZaiNar has emerged from nine years of stealth with more than $100 million in funding at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. The company developed a platform that turns existing wireless networks into a sensing system providing continuous sub-meter location accuracy without satellites, cameras, or additional device power requirements.
Investors include Steve Jurvetson, board member at ZaiNar and SpaceX; Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo; Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri; Jaan Tallinn, founding engineer of Skype; and Nicholas Pritzker, co-founder of Tao Capital. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, serves as an advisor.
The platform addresses what the company describes as physical AI’s data problem. AI systems currently lack centralized, real-time location information accurate to the sub-meter level and synchronized continuously. Physical AI requires a live feed of where everything is, and that dataset did not exist before ZaiNar’s breakthrough.
The technology is protocol-agnostic and works across 5G, WiFi, private cellular networks, and future wireless standards. ZaiNar has filed more than 100 patents with 90 issued and zero rejections, covering phase-based time synchronization and network-computed positioning. The 100 percent IP allowance rate is unusual in radio frequency engineering.
The company has secured more than $450 million in contracts and memoranda of understanding. ZaiNar’s technology is deployed commercially across healthcare, construction, smart city, and industrial applications on multiple continents, with major carrier and enterprise partnerships to be announced.
