Swift Navigation, a San Francisco-based startup building centimeter-accurate GPS technology, announced today that it has raised a $2.6 million seed round led by First Round, with participation from Fall Line Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kal Vepuri, Lemnos Labs, Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture capital group, Qualcomm Ventures, and VegasTechFund.

Swift Navigation provides centimeter-accurate positioning for agriculture, drones, and construction, anywhere on earth. Their products are 100 times more accurate than the GPS in your cell phone ' at a tenth of the price of the competition. Swift Navigation is enabling a world where fields farm themselves, drones fly safely, and humans lay the foundations of the future.

'We're incredibly impressed with what Swift Navigation's positioning technology could make possible in the very near future,' says Rob Hayes, partner at First Round. 'The team is sharp, the early traction is promising, and their products have huge implications for the way we all live and work.'

Swift Navigation believes that making centimeter-accurate positioning systems available at a low cost will open up this technology for many new applications. The company has already seen high demand for its products used for everything from UAVs to autonomous tractors, where existing navigation systems are prohibitively expensive and difficult to use. Swift's systems are designed from the ground up for machine automation, and come with an open API for easy integration into robotics systems.

'The introduction of affordable centimeter-accurate positioning will open up many new applications for drones and other autonomous systems,' says Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired and current CEO of 3D Robotics. 'The technology Swift Navigation has developed could go a long way towards proliferating robotics in everyday society.'

Next year Swift Navigation will release a rugged version of their receiver that dramatically improves the GPS in a tablet or mobile device, delivering centimeter-accurate positioning for any existing mobile app. An SDK will allow third-party developers to build rich user experiences on top of Swift's positioning platform.

About Swift Navigation

Swift Navigation is universal high-accuracy positioning, made cheap, easy and accessible. We build our RTK GPS as a platform to enable a range of new and existing applications. Already a mainstay of the surveying and precision agriculture market, we believe high accuracy positioning is necessary for the next generation of machine control applications, from unmanned aerial vehicles to robotics to autonomous transportation.