Vermeer Bets American Strike Drones Are Useless Without a GPS Replacement

A New York startup is selling the U.S. military and Ukraine a camera-and-AI navigation kit that lets drones fly without GPS, and its founder is making an unusually blunt pitch: the autonomous warfare everyone is funding does not function once the satellites go dark. Vermeer builds a Visual Positioning System, or VPS, that bolts electro-optical and infrared cameras to an onboard Nvidia computer and matches what the cameras see against pre-loaded terrain maps. No radio link to jam, no GPS signal to spoof. The drone figures out where it is by looking at the ground, the same way a pilot reads the terrain out the window.

The claim from CEO Brian Streem, reported this week by the New York Post, is that adding his hardware costs roughly 20,000 dollars per aircraft and pays for itself by keeping expensive drones from flying blind into a jammer. I have been covering GPS-denied navigation out of Ukraine since 2023, and the through-line in every credible system is the same one Vermeer is built on: stop trusting the satellite, start trusting the camera.

The vulnerability Vermeer is selling against is real and well documented

Long-range attack drones in the Shahed class can cost around 50,000 dollars, fly thousands of kilometers, and carry a heavy warhead, yet they lean on GPS and basic camera systems that Russian electronic warfare degrades routinely. Jam the satellite link or feed it false coordinates and the aircraft loses the plot, sometimes drifting until it is shot down or simply lost. This is not a theoretical weakness. It is the daily operating condition along the front.

Ukrainian operators learned this the hard way early in the war, when Russian jamming was knocking down the large majority of commercial drones sent over the line. The fix has consistently been navigation that does not depend on an outside signal, a pattern DroneXL documented when Ukrainian units first started defying Russian jamming by changing how their aircraft found their way. Fiber-optic tethers solved it one way. Onboard vision solves it another, and at far greater range.

Vermeer’s system reads terrain, stars, and the target itself

The VPS uses up to four electro-optical or infrared camera feeds running into an Nvidia edge processor, with a solid-state drive holding a 3D terrain-map database built from satellite imagery. The software compares the live camera view against the stored map to fix the aircraft’s absolute position, then layers in inertial navigation between matches. Because the cameras only watch and never transmit, the system is passive, which is the whole point in a contested airspace where anything that radiates can be detected and targeted.

Vermeer has split that capability into three named products: VPS for terrain matching, a Celestial mode that fixes position against the stars for high-altitude or featureless flight, and Terminal Guidance for the final approach onto a target. Streem told the Post the company is now adding evasive maneuvers so the drone can dodge kinetic interceptors on its own. As he put it, the cameras observe the environment and the drone decides what to do in real time, without a human or a satellite in the loop.

That architecture lines up with what other combat-tested Ukrainian programs are shipping. When DroneXL reported on FirePoint running seven generations of GPS-free navigation in roughly three years, the current generation used a cheap night camera doing the same terrain image-matching trick. Different company, same physics. Russia can jam a signal. It cannot jam a drone that is not listening for one.

The company’s path runs from Hollywood to the front line

Streem did not start in defense. Vermeer’s computer-vision software grew out of his work as an aerial cinematographer, building tools to give drone camera operators more precise, repeatable shots. The defense pivot came around 2018 to 2019, when a Techstars managing director told him the Pentagon needed exactly the capability he had built for film. Vermeer was selected for the U.S. Air Force Techstars accelerator and went on to win more than 7 million dollars in SBIR awards and non-dilutive funding through the Air Force’s AFWERX program.

The company now runs between New York and Kyiv, treating the Ukrainian front as a live test range. In October 2025 it closed a 10 million dollar Series A led by Draper Associates, with the round explicitly tied to its record helping Ukraine harden its drone fleet against jamming. Vermeer’s stated customer and partner list has grown to include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, AeroVironment, Firestorm, and Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton. In November 2025 it announced a partnership with Sentry Operations, a low-profile terminal-guidance firm, to build a full-stack autonomous strike-navigation package for electronic-warfare-dense environments.

The Pentagon is buying the lesson, slowly

The timing fits a broader U.S. shift toward cheap, mass-producible attack drones modeled on what Ukraine fields. The War Department’s Drone Dominance Program, the live-fly evaluation it calls the Gauntlet, named 25 vendors to compete for an initial 150 million dollars in prototype orders. Evaluation flights ran at Fort Benning from February 18 into early March 2026, and the Pentagon began ordering prototype deliveries after that. The program is built around one-way attack drones produced at scale and at low cost, the category that lives or dies on whether it can navigate through jamming.

This is the same convergence DroneXL tracked when Terra Drone invested in Ukraine’s Amazing Drones to build an interceptor for the global defense market, and when a Munich factory began mass-producing AI-navigating Ukrainian drones hardened against electronic warfare. Western defense money is chasing combat-proven anti-jamming navigation, and the proving ground is Ukraine. The hardware that survives there is what gets the contract.

DroneXL’s Take

Streem’s line that AI warfare does not work without his product is a sales pitch, and I read it as one. But the underlying claim survives scrutiny in a way most founder hyperbole does not. Every GPS-free system I have covered out of Ukraine, from fiber-optic FPV launchers on the Ratel H to FirePoint’s night-camera terrain matching to the EW-resistant modules Germany has been funding into Ukrainian platforms, points at the same conclusion: a long-range strike drone that cannot navigate without a satellite is a 50,000 dollar liability the moment it meets a competent jammer. Vermeer is selling the obvious answer to a problem nobody serious disputes.

What I would not do is take the company’s framing of its own origin at face value. Vermeer’s vision software started life as a tool for Hollywood camera moves, not a defense navigation thesis. The military application was a redirection, a good one, but the current GPS-replacement story was not the founding bet. I would also be careful with the validation. The tech works in Ukraine by the accounts of named partners like Lockheed, Northrop, and Skyeton, but those are customers and testimonial-givers, not independent evaluators. The most useful question about Vermeer is not whether the system flies. It is the 20,000 dollar number.

At roughly 20,000 dollars per aircraft, by Streem’s figure to the Post, Vermeer’s kit makes obvious sense on a 50,000 dollar Shahed-class drone and looks expensive on the sub-1,000 dollar FPV drones that make up the bulk of frontline attrition. The economics work at the high-value end of the fleet and get harder as the drones get cheaper, which is exactly the segment the Drone Dominance Program is trying to fill. Whether Vermeer’s per-unit cost comes down enough to ride that wave, or whether vision navigation stays a premium feature reserved for the expensive birds, is the open question. The Gauntlet’s first phase has already moved from Fort Benning flights into prototype orders, and the Pentagon has committed to spending more than a billion dollars across the program’s four phases. Watch which navigation approach the systems that survive those later phases actually ship, because that is the market telling you what jamming resistance is worth at scale.

Sources: New York Post, Defense Daily, Tectonic Defense, DefenseScoop, Vermeer.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.