Madison, Wisconsin-based quantum startup Dirac Labs is field-testing quantum sensors designed to reduce reliance on GPS and satellite-based navigation systems vulnerable to spoofing and jamming. The company, founded in 2023, is working with U.S. defense primes and agritech firms as integration partners. A former DARPA program manager advising Dirac said the company should reach large-scale production within a few years.
Dirac's approach uses nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond substrates as atomic-scale sensing qubits coupled with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano module for embedded computing. The photonic layer is packaged in a 5×5 cm plastic injection-molded cube with room-temperature operation. The company builds magnetic maps of Earth by fusing 70 years of public-domain magnetic flight data, loading that into the sensor so it operates independently of satellites. AI advances in model quantization allow the system to run entirely on-device without cloud connectivity.
Dirac is partnering with diamond foundries Great Lakes Crystal Technologies and staC12 (University of Chicago spinoff) and plans to move to standard CMOS manufacturing at foundries like SkyWater for low-volume tape-outs and eventual production scale-up. Applications target underwater asset protection, seabed mapping (over 90% of the world's seabed is unmapped), and subsea cable safeguarding—critical as intentional and accidental undersea cable cuts have disrupted global internet traffic and telecom in the Red Sea, Baltic Sea, and Taiwan Strait.