If GPS goes dark, Mesa Quantum has a backup plan

Published

4 months ago

September 5, 2024

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Flight delays in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Truckers led down unsafe routes in Richmond, Vermont. And power grid disruptions throughout Ukraine. These troubles stem from a global communication system highly reliant on GPS satellites and the signals they transmit for essential functions.

To ensure that U.S. infrastructure won’t fall apart — even if the nation’s GPS satellites are disrupted by weather, warfare or age — a startup in Boulder, Colorado called Mesa Quantum is developing chip-sized alternative technology.

Specifically, Mesa Quantum is building “chip-scale atomic clocks” and other miniaturized quantum sensors, which can measure and detect changes in the environment around a device to signal where it is in the world, where it needs to go and to keep it in sync with other systems.

These sensors can ensure clear and steady video calls regardless of the users’ location, or enable robots, underwater drones and autonomous vehicles to maneuver deftly in dense populations or around obstacles where GPS signals are weak or unavailable.

Cofounded by Mesa Quantum CEO Sristy Agrawal and CTO Wale Lawal in 2023, the company has won a $1.9 million Space Force grant to demonstrate its alternative to GPS technology in military and civilian applications.

The company has also raised about $3.7 million in a seed stage round of funding led by J2 Ventures, the Boston-based health and defense tech fund, alongside hardware investors SOSV.

J2 Ventures cofounder and managing partner, Alex Harstrick, told CNBC his fund backed Mesa Quantum in part because of the founders’ extraordinary technical background.

Agrawal recently attained a doctorate from the University of Colorado, in an elite program affiliated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her research has focused on quantum information, computing and gravity.

Agrawal told CNBC that the lab below her office at the university is home to the world’s most precise clock. “Working here and interacting with all these different groups led me to appreciate what impact these technologies could have for real, not just theoretically in the future,” she said.

Her cofounder, Lawal, is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, attained his PhD at Rice University in materials science and nano-engineering, and an MBA at Harvard.

Before taking the entrepreneurial plunge, he spent years in military research organizations, developing systems for use in “GPS contested environments” such as precision-guided missiles, swarm drone technology, and the magnetic navigation systems used to guide military aircraft.

Lawal explained that military aircraft and other vehicles cannot afford to have their systems disrupted and jammed. Any disruptions could lead to “catastrophic events for warfighters” in the air and on the ground. “If unmanned aircraft lose GPS signals, which they rely on to surveil the environment and provide intelligence information to troops down range, the troops cannot complete critical missions like a search and rescue.”

Many of the GPS satellites operated by the U.S. are now aging beyond their intended lifespans.

When they met, the scientific duo quickly agreed on the burgeoning need for mass-manufacturable, and chip-scale, technology to alleviate the risks of GPS-related failures in military and commercial systems.

Harstrick said his fund hopes that Mesa Quantum will have its first demonstration of mass scale “atomic clocks” (quantum timing sensors) validated by a top-tier semiconductor manufacturing partner” in the next few years.

He’s also guessing Mesa Quantum’s sensor tech will be in demand among companies that build or operate their own data centers.

Lawal explained, “Data centers use GPS to synchronize their networks today, so that they can accurately exchange communications or share data across the cloud. Any form of disruption to that network synchronization can cause crashes — whether that’s to a financial system, a hospital system, or a social network.”

Technology to help data centers safeguard against such crashes could help them prevent data loss and improve cybersecurity, the CTO said.

No matter which private sector players eventually embrace the startup’s quantum sensors, CEO Sristy Agrawal said the U.S. government is likely to be among Mesa Quantum’s biggest early customers. “The U.S. government has established major initiatives to spur innovation in this area and is seeking to purchase a million quantum sensors each year — if they can simply be mass-produced,” she explained.

With its grant funding and seed round in place, Agrawal said, Mesa Quantum will look to grow its team in Boulder, especially hiring atomic molecular and optical physicists, engineers and manufacturing experts this year.

The longer-term vision, she said, is to “bring a suite of quantum sensors to the market that could do everything GPS-based systems are capable of today — without all of the risks and vulnerabilities.”

Technology

YouTube donating $15 million in LA wildfire relief, support for creators days before TikTok ban

Published

4 hours ago

January 15, 2025

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YouTube donating million in LA wildfire relief, support for creators days before TikTok ban

Charred remains of buildings are pictured following the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, U.S. Jan. 15, 2025.

Mike Blake | Reuters

Google and YouTube will donate $15 million to support the Los Angeles community and content creators impacted by wildfires, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced in a blog post Wednesday.

The contributions will flow to local relief organizations including Emergency Network Los Angeles, the American Red Cross, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Institute for Nonprofit News, the blog said. When the company’s LA offices can safely reopen, impacted creators will also be able to use YouTube’s production facilities “to recover and rebuild their businesses” as well as access community events.

“To all of our employees, the YouTube creator community, and everyone in LA, please stay safe and know we’re here to support,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X.

The move comes days before Sunday’s impending TikTok ban that has already seen content creators begin asking fans to follow them on other social platforms. YouTube Shorts, a short-form video platform within YouTube, is a competitor to TikTok, along with Meta’s Instagram Reels and the fast-growing Chinese app Rednote, otherwise known as Xiahongshu.

TikTok’s U.S. operations could be worth as much as $50 billion if ByteDance decides to sell

Published

6 hours ago

January 15, 2025

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TikTok’s U.S. operations could be worth as much as billion if ByteDance decides to sell

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Business moguls such as Elon Musk should be prepared to spend tens of billions of dollars for TikTok’s U.S. operations should parent company ByteDance decide to sell.

TikTok is staring at a potential ban in the U.S. if the Supreme Court decides to uphold a national security law in which service providers such as Apple and Google would be penalized for hosting the app after the Sunday deadline. ByteDance has not indicated that it will sell the app’s U.S. unit, but the Chinese government has considered a plan in which X owner Musk would acquire the operations, as part of several scenarios in consideration, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

If ByteDance decides to sell, potential buyers may have to spend between $40 billion and $50 billion. That’s the valuation that CFRA Research Senior Vice President Angelo Zino has estimated for TikTok’s U.S. operations. Zino based his valuation on estimates of TikTok’s U.S. user base and revenue in comparison to rival apps.

TikTok has about 115 million monthly mobile users in the U.S., which is slightly behind Instagram’s 131 million, according to an estimate by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That puts TikTok ahead of Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit, which have U.S. monthly mobile user bases of 96 million, 74 million and 32 million, according to Sensor Tower.

Zino’s estimate, however, is down from the more than $60 billion that he estimated for the unit in March 2024, when the House passed the initial national security bill that President Joe Biden signed into law the following month.

The lowered estimate is due to TikTok’s current geopolitical predicament and because “industry multiples have come in a bit” since March, Zino told CNBC in an email. Zino’s estimate doesn’t include TikTok’s valuable recommendation algorithms, which a U.S. acquirer would not obtain as part of a deal, with the algorithms and their alleged ties to China being central to the U.S. government’s case that TikTok poses a national security threat.

Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence have their estimate for TikTok’s U.S. operations pegged in the range of $30 billion to $35 billion. That’s the estimate they published in July, saying at the time that the value of the unit would be “discounted due to it being a forced sale.”

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts noted that finding a buyer for TikTok’s U.S. operations that can both afford the transaction and deal with the accompanying regulatory scrutiny on data privacy makes a sale challenging. It could also make it difficult for a buyer to expand TikTok’s ads business, they wrote.

A consortium of businesspeople including billionaire Frank McCourt and O’Leary Ventures Chairman Kevin O’Leary put in a bid to buy TikTok from ByteDance. O’Leary has previously said the group would be willing to pay up to $20 billion to acquire the U.S. assets without the algorithm.

Unlike a Musk bid, O’Leary’s group’s bid would be free from regulatory scrutiny, O’Leary said in a Monday interview with Fox News.

O’Leary said that he’s “a huge Elon Musk fan,” but added “the idea that the regulator, even under Trump’s administration, would allow this is pretty slim.”

TikTok, X and O’Leary Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.

Watch: Chinese TikTok alternative surges

Technology

Bitcoin approaches $100,000 again as a cool inflation reading fuels risk appetite

Published

8 hours ago

January 15, 2025

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Bitcoin approaches 0,000 again as a cool inflation reading fuels risk appetite

Mustafa Ciftci | Anadolu via Getty Images

Bitcoin extended its rebound on Wednesday, hovering just below $100,000 after another encouraging inflation report fueled investors’ risk appetite.

The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 3% at $99,444.43, bringing its 2-day gain to about 7%, according to Coin Metrics.

The CoinDesk 20 index, which measures the broader market of cryptocurrencies, gained 6%.

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Bitcoin approaches $100,000 after Wednesday’s CPI data

Shares of Coinbase gained 6%. Bitcoin proxies MicroStrategy and Mara Holdings each gained about 4%.

Wednesday’s move followed the release of the December consumer price index, which showed core inflation unexpectedly slowed in December. A day earlier, the market got another bright inflation reading in the producer price index, which showed wholesale prices rose less in December than expected.

The post-election crypto rally fizzled into the end of 2024 after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sounded an inflation warning on Dec. 18, and bitcoin suffered even steeper losses last week as a spike in bond yields prompted investors to dump growth-oriented risk assets. This Monday, bitcoin briefly dipped below $90,000.

The price of bitcoin has been taking its cue from the equities market in recent weeks, thanks in part to the popularity of bitcoin ETFs, which have led to the institutionalization of the asset. Bitcoin’s correlation with the S&P 500 has climbed in the past week, while its correlation with gold has dropped sharply since the end of December.