ZaiNar gets physical with 5G positioning

• ZaiNar's CEO said that his startup's positioning system can track fast-moving objects
• The startup has spent 9 years developing this technology
• They've grabbed over $100 million in funding

Want to track your robot, or other autonomous moving object? Even if it's underground or needs to negotiate reliably around an anonymous white-walled factory?

Location startup ZaiNar said that its new software-based location tracking system uses the 5G network - not GPS satellite tracking or bluetooth - to do that, while being more accurate and fast than current cellular triangulation systems.

"At MWC, you're going to hear a lot about location services that are coming out over the next couple of decades," said ZaiNar CEO Danny Jacker in conversation with Fierce. Indeed, there is already plenty of talk about "precise dynamic positioning down to the centimeter" on 6G networks, which will start to arrive around 2030.

"ZaiNar's technology runs on today's 5G networks," Jacker said. "An infrastructure that carriers already have deployed."

"We deliver sub-10 centimeter accuracy at ranges up to one and a half kilometers with 100 to 500 updates per device versus roughly 1 per second [with cellular positioning]," Jacker added. The software-only network side deployment system is a cellular positioning system that works over GPS, RTK, ultrawideband (UWB) and WiFi.

"We have over $450 million of contracts and MoUs," Jacker said, claiming that his company's technology was already being deployed in multiple countries. The CEO, however, didn't want to name any of the companies deploying the technology, yet.

Network side

Jacker said that ZaiNar's network side software system doesn't use the 5G Positioning Reference Signal (PRS) like other 5G cellular positioning systems. "They only let you send that signal once a second so it doesn't support moving objects," he noted.

Instead, ZaiNar is using the 5G Sounding Reference Signal (SRS) that is sent every 10 or 20 milliseconds on the 5G network. "So you can support very fast-moving objects...cars and drones," Jacker said. "On top of that, because it's a network side function there's nothing to do with that user device, so whether it is a phone, drone, or robot, not only is no software on the end application, there's no battery there either," Jacker said.

He said the ZaiNar system can use the RedCap 5G IoT system. This uses much less spectrum than standard macro 5G approaches: 20 MHz of spectrum versus 100 MHz for standard 5G. The PRS-based 5G positioning systems require 100 MHz of spectrum, Jacker noted.

All of this makes the ZaiNar system suitable for managing large robotics projects or what some are calling industrial AI. The system can take the location and positioning compute off the robot and put it on the 5G network.

Into the swarm

"You free up the robot for a higher functioning task," Jacker said. There's about 20 millisecond latency, and we're giving the robot a real-time location of where it is and the context of its environment. We tell it not just where it is, but where every robot, every human worker and every other machine is."

As nature communications noted in July 2025 this kind of swarm intelligence model is used to address complex tasks by multi-agent systems. The ZaiNar positioning will help to enable that kind of model, Jacker said.

Belmont, California-based ZaiNar has secured over $100 million in funding. The company undertook 9 years of development of its Physical AI platform before emerging from stealth last week, according to the CEO.