Vermeer

Vermeer is a US-Ukrainian startup, founded in 2018 by Brian Streem and headquartered in New York with a field team in Kyiv, that builds a Visual Positioning System (VPS) for navigating without GPS. Instead of satellite signals, the drone reads the ground the way a pilot reads terrain through a cockpit window: electro-optical or infrared cameras capture imagery that AI software, running on an Nvidia platform, matches against 2D or 3D maps to compute position. Because it relies on what the aircraft can see rather than a radio fix, the system keeps working when Russian electronic warfare jams or spoofs GPS.

The company says its technology has been deployed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine for navigation under electronic attack, with the Kyiv team validating it against front-line conditions. In October 2025 Vermeer closed a $10 million Series A led by Draper Associates , with participation from several venture funds and the U.S. Air Force’s Techstars program. Its vision-based, satellite-free approach places it alongside Ukrainian peers such as NORDA Dynamics and the Ukrainian-American firm Blue Arrow .