NextNav Closes $70 million Series D Financing

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- NextNav LLC, a leading provider of location services for indoor and urban environments, today announced that it has closed a $70 million dollar Series D financing.  The round was led by leading venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Oak Investment Partners, who were joined by existing investors Columbia Capital, Telcom Ventures and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. Peter Barris, Managing General Partner at NEA, and Bandel Carano, Managing Partner at Oak will join NextNav's Board of Directors. 

"With the proliferation of wireless devices and location-based services, there is an acute need for accurate, reliable indoor positioning," said Peter Barris, Managing General Partner of NEA.  "Initially driven by the most critical use case, E911 emergency calling, NextNav has developed an elegant solution to address this growing mass-market problem. The team has extensive experience building mass-scale technology businesses, and we are excited to partner with them as they enter this next phase of growth."

The financing will be used to extend the commercialization of NextNav's revolutionary Metropolitan Beacon System ("MBS") positioning network. MBS provides reliable, accurate horizontal and vertical location services inside buildings and in urban areas where satellite-based GPS signals aren't available or reliable. The Company is deploying its MBS network much like a cellular network, resulting in wide-area coverage that delivers its location services to every building within its network footprint.

"The opportunity to layer commercial and government applications onto this platform is boundless," said Bandel Carano, Managing Partner at Oak. "With ubiquity and carrier-grade reliability as underlying principles, the company is essentially bringing GPS indoors and adding floor-level vertical accuracy."

The Company's network has been rigorously trialed and offers its next-generation positioning solution for a myriad of applications. The combination of accurate indoor positioning with ubiquitous availability, managed-network reliability and floor-level vertical accuracy is particularly suited to safety-of-life applications like E911, especially in multi-story structures. Enabling the ubiquitous location of wireless devices indoors, where they are used most frequently, is also expected to be bring significant benefits to commercial and consumer applications for which reliable, rapid and precise location or proximity awareness is vital.

"NextNav's mission is to deliver GPS-like reliability, accuracy and ubiquity to the indoor and dense urban environment," said NextNav CEO, Gary Parsons. "We are delighted to have the support of top-tier venture partners and the deep domain and industry expertise of our new board members as we bring this powerful new technology to market."

About NextNav
NextNav is deploying a revolutionary positioning technology to allow mobile phones and other devices to reliably determine their location in indoor and urban environments where GPS signals can't be received. NextNav's technology combines accurate horizontal positioning with floor-level height precision. Delivered over a managed network with carrier-grade dependability and metropolitan-wide coverage, NextNav's positioning services are designed for E911, public safety and emergency response as well as the multitude of consumer and commercial applications that require precise indoor location accuracy. Based in Sunnyvale, CA and McLean, VA, NextNav is working with the Public Safety community and major technology partners to embed its capability into new GPS chipsets and mobile phones.

More information is available at http://www.nextnav.com.

SOURCE NextNav, LLC