WSJ Tech News Briefing
TNB Tech Minute: Australian GPS-Alternative Reaches Unicorn Status
18 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Wednesday, March 18th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Australian GPS-alternative startup reaching unicorn status?
Advanced navigation has reached Silicon Valley's prized unicorn status, raising $110 million in its latest funding round. The Australian startup built AI-assisted hardware that helps aircraft, ships, and other vehicles navigate GPS dead zones, including in areas where GPS is deliberately jammed.
GPS jamming has been common along the Russia-Ukraine border in recent years, and now the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil is transported, is under such attacks. Boeing and Airbus are already customers of advanced navigation. The company is now looking to accelerate growth in the U.S. and Europe.
Chapter 3: How are Canadian defense companies responding to the rise in global military spending?
Canada's defense and space technology companies are being pulled into a global upswing of military spending. Kraken Robotics is benefiting from a surge in subsea surveillance and robotics orders, while Telesat and MDA Space are seeing stronger pipelines tied to space-based communications, Earth observation, and intelligence systems.
Together, these trends are creating unusually large backlogs across the sector. Investor enthusiasm has followed, and shares of these Canadian defense names have rallied sharply over recent quarters. And NVIDIA is launching the Nemotron Coalition to develop open AI models that offer an alternative to proprietary giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
CEO Jensen Huang announced the coalition will advance frontier foundation models through shared expertise, data, and compute. He said the coalition will support transparency, collaboration, sovereignty, and broader access to intelligence.
Chapter 4: What is NVIDIA's Nemotron Coalition and why is it important for AI development?
Initial members include Mistral AI, Perplexity, and Reflection AI. The first model will support NVIDIA's Nemotron 4 family of open models. While proprietary developers have led the field, open models, which are free to download and modify, are catching up. And that's it for your TMB Tech Minutes.
Chapter 5: How do open AI models compare to proprietary models in the current tech landscape?
We'll have another Quick Tech Update in the morning.