ANELLO Photonics Secures $25M in Series B-2 Funding to Advance GPS-Independent Navigation Systems

ANELLO Photonics operates where GPS gives up and precision still has to perform. Santa Clara is used to big ideas, but this one hums at a different frequency. Dr. Mario Paniccia, the kind of operator who spent 2 decades turning silicon photonics into something real at Intel, co-founded ANELLO Photonics with Mike A. Horton, a name that already carried weight in navigation long before GPS started acting unreliable. Together, they leaned into a simple truth most people ignore until it’s too late: when GPS disappears, so does your margin for error.

That’s the backdrop for a fresh $25M Series B-2 round. Led by MESH, with Washington Harbour Partners stepping in and Lockheed Martin doubling down alongside returning capital, this isn’t just money showing up, it’s conviction getting louder, especially when the same players who understand contested environments best keep writing checks.

The tech isn’t trying to be flashy, it’s trying to be right. ANELLO’s SiPhOG™, a Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope, delivers fiber-optic-level precision without the bulk or fragility that usually comes with it, which means a smaller footprint, lower cost, and the kind of resilience that doesn’t panic when GPS drops off the map. Land, air, sea, if it moves and thinks for itself, it needs to know where it is, and ANELLO makes sure it does.

Inside a 28-person team, that’s a tight crew solving a very expensive problem, with <$5M in revenue today but sitting on 28 issued patents and 44 more pending, a ratio that tells you everything because this is deep tech playing the long game, not chasing quarterly applause.

Leadership stays grounded in execution with Dr. Mario Paniccia at CEO, still pushing the edge of photonics, while Mike A. Horton, co-founder and former CTO through early 2025, remains the original architect behind the core innovation, supported by operators like Walter Stockwell and Kirstin Schauble who are turning theory into deployed systems where failure isn’t an option.

The play here is quiet but surgical, scale production, tighten integration, and own the moments where GPS can’t show up, across defense, aerospace, and autonomy, industries where “almost accurate” gets people fired or worse, and that tension is exactly where ANELLO chooses to operate, not loudly, but precisely.