Forget geolocation measured in meters. Goeoflex offers positioning up to 4 cm precision, in real time, anywhere in the world, on land, at sea, and in the air up to 25,000 km altitude. This Ile-de-France startup does not have a constellation of satellites. It only increases, by a factor of one hundred, the accuracy provided by current geolocation services.
As a reminder, GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite Systems, such as the American GPS and its European (Galileo), Russian (Glonass) and Chinese (BeiDou/Compass) equivalents provide an accuracy of the order of one to ten meters, Galileo being the most efficient in this field.
Correct satellite errors
To achieve this centimetric feat, Geoflex relies on a technology developed over the past dozen years by the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes), called PPP for Precise Point Positioning. This technology, protected by seven patents, corrects errors in the geolocation provided by GNSS, whether they are satellite orbit errors, errors in their atomic clock or electronic biases.
Geoflex markets this “correction feed” in the form of a subscription. It is up to the manufacturer to integrate it into its GNSS receivers or to use the all-in-one box (photo) offered by the startup. This hypergeolocation responds to a large number of use cases in the fields of road, rail, sea or air transport, construction, smart cities or precision agriculture.
The new funding round that has just been completed by Geoflex shows the interest shown by manufacturers in this subject. The company raised 6 million euros by welcoming Bouygues, Stellantis and Thales to its capital. Each of these three large groups have particular needs in terms of very high precision positioning.
Autonomous vehicles and precision agriculture
In the automotive world, we are of course thinking of on-board navigation but also of new services related to the connected car – sharing of information between vehicles, pedestrians, and infrastructure (V2X) – while waiting for autonomous driving.
Hyper-geolocation allows railway players to provide a better information service to passengers, to optimize driving assistance and to increase traffic by reducing the spacing between trains. In air, the control of drones and future flying taxis is primarily concerned.
Construction industry players will be interested in covering their sites and remotely controlling machines such as connected cranes. So-called precision agriculture covers the spreading of phytosanitary products or the automated treatment of weeds.
In terms of security or compliance, hypergeolocation associated with precise time stamping makes it possible to authenticate the positioning of people and connected objects, to trace and certify field operations. Geoflix specifies that the technology used is resistant to jamming and spoofing techniques.
The fundraising should enable Geoflex to beef up its R&D and sales force to become “the world leader in satellite hypergeolocation”.
