ZaiNar has joined the Arm Total Design for Physical AI ecosystem as a founding location partner, bringing its real-time location technology to an ecosystem focused on accelerating development and deployment of autonomous systems.
Arm Total Design for Physical AI brings together companies across the physical AI technology stack with the goal of reducing development complexity and helping companies move autonomous systems from design into deployment more quickly.
ZaiNar will contribute shared real-time location awareness for robots and autonomous machines while optimizing its algorithms and signal processing technology for Arm-based computing platforms.
The company’s technology turns existing wireless infrastructure into a location sensor and can provide sub-10-centimeter positioning indoors, underground, and in GPS-denied environments. It operates on the network side without requiring changes to devices or additional hardware and does not add battery consumption.
ZaiNar provides location updates between 100 and 500 times per second, compared with a maximum of approximately once per second for standard 5G positioning reference signals. The technology is carrier-agnostic and can operate across WiFi, 5G, and other radio protocols.
The company sees three primary robotics applications for the technology: grounding robot training models in real-world movement patterns, enabling coordinated robot and autonomous-machine swarms, and creating persistent environmental memory that can be inherited by new machines rather than requiring each system to independently map an environment.
Founded in 2017 and based in Belmont, California, ZaiNar has raised more than $100 million, is valued at more than $1 billion, and holds more than 100 patents. Its investors include Samsung, SoftBank, AME Cloud Ventures, Future Ventures, and GFC.
KEY QUOTES:
“Robotics has spent a decade teaching every machine to figure out where it is, one machine at a time. That was the only option when location had to come from the robot. It does not anymore. The networks are already deployed, and they can tell every machine on site where everything is, continuously, without adding a single piece of hardware. That is what we are bringing to the Arm Total Design for Physical AI ecosystem.”
Daniel Jacker, CEO and Co-Founder of ZaiNar
“As physical AI moves toward deployment, autonomous systems need a shared understanding of the environments around them. Arm Total Design for Physical AI is designed to bring together the technologies needed to make that possible at scale, and ZaiNar’s location intelligence adds a critical layer of real-world awareness for robotics and autonomous machines.”
Dermot O’Driscoll, Vice President of Go-to-Market, Physical AI at Arm
