NextNav Strengthens Executive Leadership Team With Industry Pioneers

NextNav LLC, the leader in 3D geolocation services, announced the addition of two new executives to its leadership team as it delivers next-generation location infrastructure to serve public safety, critical infrastructure and which can be leveraged for a wide range of commercial applications. Ashutosh (Ashu) Pande joins as Vice President and General Manager of Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS) Services and Dan Hight joins as Vice President and General Manager of Data Partnerships.

NextNav is deploying a new nationwide Z-Axis service that offers precise altitude determination (less than 3 meters) enabling floor-level determination in major urban markets across the country. The Z-Axis service will provide the vertical dimension to traditional latitude/longitude services enabling everything from better COVID-19 contact tracing to creation of more accurate location-based audiences and attribution services. As previously announced, NextNav is allowing COVID-19 contact tracing applications use of NextNav Z-Axis free of charge.

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“We do not live in a two dimensional world, and adding the vertical context will help complete the location picture for healthcare officials as well as marketers, who are both relying on location services to help solve real-world issues,” said Dan Hight, VP/GM Data Partnerships.  “Knowing if someone is on the first floor in a coffee shop or on the 10^th floor in an office above it means two very different things and having a solution that solves this will be game changing for our partners.”

Prior to NextNav, Dan Hight was an executive at mobile location platform GroundTruth and advisor to media companies, technology platforms and associations. While at GroundTruth, he was instrumental in securing strategic partnerships with iHeart Media, Cox Media Group, OUTFRONT Media, Live Nation, Univision and Rubicon Project. A location media veteran, Hight has created strategic partnerships for the past 20 years.

NextNav is also building out a ground based MBS infrastructure that will provide outdoor and indoor 3D positioning and help solve the inaccuracy of GPS in dense urban areas. Further, NextNav is commercializing technology that serves as a backup to GPS, ensuring uninterrupted operation of critical infrastructure. A NIST sponsored study by RTI International, estimated that the economic impacts to the U.S. economy caused by a 30-day loss of GPS would be $1 billion per day and could be 50 percent higher if the disruptions occurred at the least opportune time.

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“NextNav’s MBS solution is the commercially available PNT system that integrates well with existing GNSS chipsets and hardware to deliver Alternate Position, Navigation and Timing (APNT),” said Ashu Pande, VP/GM MBS Services. “I am excited to have the opportunity to enable NextNav’s GPS 3D location solution as a geo-redundant solution for critical infrastructure, first responders, IoT systems, enterprises and autonomous vehicles.”

Pande brings with him deep experience of the mobile telecommunications and geospatial industry. A location industry veteran with over 50 patents in GPS, he has evangelized the use of GPS by consumers, drove receiver miniaturization, pioneered its adoption in mobile phones and shipped GPS chipset in 10’s of millions to handset leaders including Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola and RIM.  While at SiRF (later acquired by CSR and subsequently Qualcomm), Pande worked with operators, privacy groups, handset vendors and digital map providers to make GPS available as a simple to use API delivering Location, Context and Motion dynamics to applications developers, heralding the beginning of ‘user selectable’ Location Based Services.

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