OSCP Builds Photonic Navigation for GNSS-Denied Systems

OSCP builds inertial sensors for machines that cannot stop moving when satellite navigation becomes unreliable. The Montréal company combines photonic gyroscopes, MEMS sensors, and on-board navigation software for drones, aircraft, vessels, robots, rail systems, and ground vehicles operating through GNSS jamming, spoofing, degradation, or loss.

Founded in 2015, OSCPS Motion Sensing Inc. operates as OSCP and is led by founder and CEO Kazem Zandi. The current leadership team also includes COO Alex Lintott, Head of Product Thibaut Gravey, and VP of Sales Paul Miyoshi.

OSCP matters now because resilient navigation has moved from a specialist defense concern into an operating requirement. Regulators are documenting persistent GNSS interference, autonomous platforms are moving beyond controlled environments, and buyers increasingly care about both sensor performance and whether a component can cross a border without importing another country's export regime.

OSCP Shrinks Optical Navigation Into a Smaller Package

Traditional fiber-optic gyroscopes measure rotation with light, but their precision-wound optical fiber makes them large, power-intensive, and slow to manufacture. OSCP's company story begins with a different manufacturing question: can the optical path be built on a photonic integrated circuit instead of wound by hand?

The physics is still the Sagnac effect. The commercial bet is that semiconductor-style production can bring optical stability into the size, weight, power, and cost envelope required by smaller autonomous systems. OSCP describes itself as a fabless Canadian integrated-optics sensor company and says it has 15 patents granted across its platform.

The company's MK2 family spans 3 performance tiers. The MK2M2 is a tactical-grade MEMS inertial measurement unit. The MK2E2 replaces the heading-axis MEMS gyroscope with a photonic one. The MK2Z is a navigation-grade photonic prototype for longer periods without a reliable satellite fix. The distinction matters because drift accumulates over time, and every platform pays for more accuracy in power, weight, cost, or all 3.

The Product Is Becoming a Navigation Stack

An accurate sensor is useful. A sensor that arrives with the interfaces, drivers, calibration, and compute required by the customer's platform is much easier to deploy.

NavigationGate is OSCP's move up that stack. The processing unit fuses an OSCP IMU with dual-antenna, RTK-compatible GNSS and customer aiding sensors, then outputs position, velocity, and attitude. Its Kalman filter runs locally on the board, reducing the amount of navigation software the host computer must own.

OSCP has also added ArduPilot support, a C SDK, Python examples, and an open-source ROS 2 driver under the MIT license. That work is less photogenic than a new chip, but it is commercially important. Hardware adoption often dies in the integration queue, not on the datasheet.

The company reports that its MK2M2 and MK2E2 are shipping, while the MK2Z remains an early-access prototype. OSCP's published 21-minute Montréal road test ended 5.7 meters from ground truth with the photonic MK2E2 and 20.5 meters away with the MEMS MK2M2 under the same aiding setup. Those are company-reported results, not an independent benchmark, but they show the product question clearly: how much heading accuracy can a platform preserve after the external reference disappears?

Traction Is Moving From Lab Proof to Procurement Paths

OSCP's earlier work included a prototype field test with Thales Canada. In 2026, the company won a Canadian defense testing contract for 4 enhanced IMU variants, with an initial phase covering assembly, calibration, and independent laboratory testing. OSCP also qualified in 3 streams of Canada's Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace through July 2031.

The marketplace qualification is not a contract and guarantees no revenue. It does, however, give Canadian defense buyers a direct procurement path for positioning, navigation, and timing requirements. That distinction is the difference between claiming traction and describing what the evidence actually supports.

The company has also established channel relationships in Europe and India. Its product pages say OSCP sensors are in customer hands across defense, aerospace, robotics, and heavy industry, but public evidence does not establish customer count, revenue, backlog, production volume, or audited field performance.

OSCP raised a $1.2M Seed round from 7percent Ventures and 2050 Capital and received $4.2M in earlier grants. In August 2026, it closed an undisclosed Series A led by New Science Ventures, with Emerging Ventures and 2050 Capital participating. The new capital is intended to scale Montréal production, expand engineering and sales, and advance the next generation of photonic inertial sensors.

Leadership Connects Photonics, Product, and Commercialization

Kazem Zandi founded OSCP after work in process engineering at C2MI and at Defence Research and Development Canada. Alex Lintott serves as COO. Thibaut Gravey leads product definition and delivery after earlier work on the company's embedded software, sensor calibration, and real-time signal-processing stack. Paul Miyoshi leads sales.

New Science Ventures founder and managing partner Somu Subramaniam joined OSCP's board with the Series A. Cornel Chiriac, founding partner of 2050 Capital, is listed as a board observer. These roles are current on OSCP's official leadership page; no current CTO is publicly listed, so the article does not invent one.

OSCP's stated advantage is also geopolitical. The company says its products are designed and manufactured in Canada without US-origin ITAR-controlled content. That can reduce a US re-export dependency for allied customers, although Canadian export controls and destination-specific compliance still apply. "ITAR-free" is a supply-chain attribute, not a universal exemption from export law.

Hiring Shows Where OSCP Must Execute

OSCP's careers page lists Montréal openings across photonics, embedded systems, applications software, and GNSS/INS sensor fusion. The roles emphasize hands-on ownership, production test, calibration, SDKs, firmware, customer integration, and the ability to carry hardware from research into a repeatable product.

That hiring mix is a market signal. OSCP is not staffing only for another sensor prototype. It is building the manufacturing, navigation-software, and application layers required to support systems in customer environments.

The pressure is equally visible. A small deep-tech company must make photonics, packaging, electronics, calibration, firmware, fusion, interfaces, documentation, and field support work at the same time. One weak layer can turn impressive sensor physics into a slow customer program.

Why OSCP Matters

OSCP sits where 3 markets overlap: resilient positioning, photonic integration, and sovereign defense supply chains. Its opportunity is to make optical inertial performance practical for platforms that cannot carry legacy navigation hardware and cannot assume GNSS will remain honest.

The company has credible technical lineage, shipping products, active hiring, a broader integration stack, government qualification, and new capital. It also has unanswered commercial questions. Public sources do not disclose Series A size, valuation, revenue, customer concentration, manufacturing yield, or repeat-order data.

Those gaps define the next test. OSCP must convert laboratory and field demonstrations into independently validated performance, repeatable production, named deployments, and programs that move from qualification into paid scale.

Navigation resilience is becoming infrastructure. If OSCP can industrialize photonic sensing without losing its size, power, integration, and export advantages, the Montréal company will be selling more than a better gyroscope. It will be selling continuity when the signal overhead can no longer be trusted.